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POETRY

Slithering, Twitching

In the tropical dead of day,
a grey squirrel with twitching tail
makes his rounds with gifts

for the community garden.
The squirrel keeps to the shadow side
and fills the soil with the usual thistle

seeds emptied from a lady’s bird feeder.
It’s rather funny
and if chatter is laughter

this squirrel’s a jester,
seeding the garden with little jokes,
except today, in a strike of blurring light,

the squirrel left something new —
a snakeskin — as if to say
“well ain’t that nice, ain’t that nice!”

in this slithering, twitching,
slithering, twitching, slithering, twitching
paradise.

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David Athey’s poems and stories have appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including Christianity & Literature, The Iowa Review, Dappled Things, Berkeley Fiction Review, Windhover, Palm Beach Illustrated, Time of Singing, and Notre Dame Magazine. Athey lives in Florida on a small lake with large iguanas. His books, including Art is for The Artist, are available at Amazon.

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Image: “Squirrel at Sheffield Botanical Garden” by Daniel Silva, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Modified by Veronica McDonald.