High water sucked the beach clean of debris.
High winds downed boughs and the high osprey’s nest.
She perches on a driftwood log, half-dead,
eyes on the tide, without her fledglings now.
All June she dropped fish in the crowded aerie,
its crown of twigs topping a patchy pine:
the racket then, like bagpipes on the sea
blown by a piper still drunk in the morning.
We wondered if without her nest she’d go.
She was our bird, her cry our intimate,
a siren-wail each time we crossed the beach.
Rebuild, poor mama bird, we thought. But no.