It’s another month, so that means a new challenge for the Sunday Night Poetry Swaggers. This month I posed the challenge of writing a question poem.
I had some pretty feeble starts at this one, but one day last week I was inspired by the very thing happening in our wood duck house. Last year we put up a wood duck house around this time of year, but the first clutch never hatched. We are watching through a Ring doorbell camera attached to the roof of the nest box.
We have another hen. She’s been sitting since February 24th, so projected hatch date is somewhere between March 16th and 18th. I have a good feeling about this hen. Even though we’ve had some cool nights, she sits all night and leaves once in the morning and once in the evening to feed. When she leaves, she completely covers the clutch with down, so we really have no idea how many eggs she is sitting on. We learned our lesson last year, so we will Not be going out there to check.
Stay tuned. In the meantime, my question poem.
Will She Come Again?
It’s February and we wonder
will she come again,
this wood duck mother hen?Will she find the house we’ve built?
a box, like a cypress quilt,
waiting to be a home.In the morning we look and see.
Papa wood duck, where is she?
Where’s your mate? Is she about?Connected to our house WiFi,
we keep a daily eye,
a camera on the nestbox roof.She’s in, then out, then in again,
this mother wood duck hen.
Will she lay a clutch?How many eggs? It’s hard to tell.
She covers them all so well.
Plucks her down, soft and warm.How does she know how?
Margaret Simon, (c) 2020
Waiting, watching, wondering now
for twenty-eight more days.
Will wood duck chicks hatch from this downy haze?
Read more question poems from my writing pals:
Reflections on the Teche 