Editor’s note: This week we feature the work of Barbara Leon, an Aptos resident and a writer/editor in the natural health field. Her poetry has appeared in americas review, the Anthology of Monterey Bay Poets, Bathyspheric Review, BorderSenses, Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, In Our Own Words, Paterson Literary Review (Honorable Mention 2007 Allen Ginsberg Awards) and Porter Gulch Review (2004 Poet of the Year).

Elkhorn Slough in Springtime

Fingers of earth rest on the estuary
and, edging the mudflats, pickleweed
grows, sucking salt clear to its tips.

There’s a spot by the freshwater
pond where periwinkles announce the blue
morning, while silversides leap the channel

in hot pursuite of flies. In the tops of three
tall pines, egrets nest, scratching and scrambling,
they strip the boughs bare as nearby

ghost trees stand, guano-slathered,
past seasons’ sacrifice to the birthing
rites. I return to the rookery in spring, watch

the great white bird shake loose his plumage,
shivering a fan dance for his mate,
and though I’ve seen it before, my breath catches.

This is how the chick must feel, high
in those treetops, when aqua eggshell
cracks, opening curtains on the world.

Elkhorn Slough in Springtime appeared in the Porter Gulch Review 2007.

Shearwaters at Sunset

They gather offshore like a storm –
the kind back east, when maple leaves
swirl in gusts, their open hands stopping
light. Here birds cloud the sky, dark shapes
set off by sun rays glancing off white
underwings, the shearwaters dive, splash
lightly like raindrops.

They slice the crests off waves,
scan ocean’s surface for herring schools.
They race, a whirling dervish of birds,
Sucking fish inside a maelstrom.
Stirrred up by the ruckus, pelicans plunge
and gulls swoop in a rush
of squawks and flapping.

You stand, immersed in lapping waves,
as fish slap your ankles and calves,
sky behind you backlit to gunmetal blue and

up on the sand, two teenaged boys
eyes squinting, jaws tight as traps,
aim stones at feathered bodies
beyond their reach,
as if to bring down this anarchy,
this force inside themselves.

Shearwaters in Springtime appeared in the Bathyspheric Review, Spring 2005

Mahmud Al-Qayed, the Songbird Catcher

He was not the first songbird
catcher to fall, only the youngest.
His father fell to his knees, buried

his face in the nubby sweater, breathed in
the damp of his small son’s blood.
In a grove where bird catchers and farmers

are banned, songbirds nest in olive trees,
the olives turn black, and fall,
shriveled, yesterday’s hope in Gaza

where olive trees fall
by thousands, their tough bark
no match for settlers’ saws

their boughs for bulldozers,
yet this ancient grove so far
survives. Three song sparrows

also survive, they hop about in wire
cages Mahmud carried to market
first Friday of Ramadan.

Birds felled with net tied to string
the weapon he held, a suspicious character
shot dead by fence shielding kibbutz Nahal Oz,

in uprooted Gaza, where birds and small boys find
no refuge in olive branches, soft bodies
beat wings against wire, trilling freedom songs.

The Songbird Catcher appeared in Crab Orchard Review, summer/fall 2005.

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