Dragonfly Tales: Birdsong~Words and Songs at Odonata

We’ve had many visitors over the years here at Odonata Sanctuary: students from R.I.T. who come every year to study the barn built ‘off the grid’, young artists from the Mill Art Gallery who come to collect a peacock feather and take a hayride on a wagon pulled by Honu the antique tractor, students from a city school who come and wonder why we put potatoes underground, Girl Scouts and BoyScouts, Sea Scouts and Green Sprouts, and recently, field biology students from SUNY Geneseo who came to study the galls in goldenrod. We’ve had mushroom experts, frog and toad experts, wildflower experts, birders from around the world, nature photographers, nature musicians, butterfly chasers and dragonfly doyens. We’ve had plein air artists spread across the fields with their canvases glowing with nature. When my son asked one elderly artist how he would know when the work was finished “he replied, after lifting the piece off his easel,” ‘Nope, not heavy enough yet’.  Artists, like our own local Patrick Brennan, have created ‘works in the woods’ using all natural materials, many are still unfound to this day. 

One of our favorite groups who recently had a ‘Nothing with a Mother’ potluck picnic here at the sanctuary is the ‘Just Poets’ group from Rochester. The theme of the gathering was birds. I’d like to pay homage and thanks to their work by including a few of their poems in this monthly column.

From the intro to Birdsong: poems in celebration of birds, edited by Eric Rounds & Bart White (FootHills Publishing, 2017) 

“Birds expand our consciousness; we elevate our own lives watching them. Reading poems such as these was the genesis for wanting to make a collection of new poems to celebrate birds.” Bart White, editor