During the Sixth Extinction

by Jeannine Marie Pitas

For Mary Colwell

A woman walks a thousand miles

along the coasts of England and Ireland

telling people about curlews.

We have seven years left

to save them. “These birds mean

something to us,” she says.

I think of her journey

as I watch the milkweed

lie in wait for the occasional monarch.

I'm not sure when it changed.

I'm not sure when dark summer nights

were bereft of fireflies, when 

monarchs' black and orange faces

started appearing

on missing person posters.

I don't know when bats' swooping

dives diminished, when they stopped writing

calligraphy on their night flights,

I don't know when the clover receded,

when frogs began to disappear,

when the great herds of caribou diminished by half.

I do know when Mary Oliver died,

that precious poet so many roll their eyes at,

her grace too easily graspable

to seem true.

What was the last thing she saw

when there were no more graceful chevrons

gliding over the lake, 

when there weren't 

enough flapping wings

for any of us to find

in the passage of their flight 

our names

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Jeannine Marie Pitas is a teacher, writer, and Spanish-English literary translator living in Iowa, where she teaches at the University of Dubuque. Her first poetry collection, Things Seen and Unseen, was published by Mosaic Press in 2019. Her favorite poets include Wislawa Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, and Delmira Agustini.