Breakfast Club

Orion’s slow tumble from winter’s black
announces our day’s sunup meal, the birds and me;
finches are first to pick-peck fall’s bounty.
Sagging branched apples offer their exposed flanks
to the songbirds’ mixed tape this December morn’.
Flap-flitting from appled branch to next sweet tidbit.
                   A furtive dance of
       jab,       glance,       nibble,       glimpse.

Mine are cubed for a sour-milk ground-Linum mess,
A world’s bounty of Yakima apples, Dorset tea,
Petaluma yogurt, and Oregon golden flax-meal,
spooned while watching the warblers nibble-swivel,
steel on porcelain clacks to my eager mouth.
	        A morning fuss of
      bless,   chew,   view,   sip,   email,   gulp.

Nuthatches sing pip-kit ki-dee of apple joy;
full-bellied terns wing inland over us
indifferent on return from a fish trip.
Sparrows flock in for a nip-snip serenade
of plaintive varied pitched whistles that trill my ear.
The backyard tree bustles with skittering birds
squabbling over the best morsels and prized pip,
         flutter,      munch,       peek,     peck 
                    each day with me.

Corey Weinstein is a retired physician whose poetry has been published in Vistas and Byways, The New Verse News, Forum, and Jewish Currents. He currently attends writing classes at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in San Francisco and hosts their Poetry Circle. Weinstein has also been published in a number of medical/academic publications. He is an advocate for prisoner rights as the founder of California Prison Focus, and he led the American Public Health Association’s Prison Committee for many years. In his free time, he plays the clarinet in a local jazz band.

[image: White-Breasted Nuthatch | Nick Saunders]