In the Nature of Things by Howie Good

A robin was pecking for something
under the cotton candy blue hydrangea

by our front steps. I stood looking out
the screen door, trying not to analyze

or philosophize, just simply observe.
The robin pecked one particular spot

with strange insistence – like a dark-
winged angel, I thought, excavating

the site of a future hell. Then the robin,
for its own inscrutable reasons, flew off.

Doesn’t mean they weren’t good reasons.



Howie Good is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).