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Waiting
for the
Quetzal
David Chorlton
The Green Kingfisher
The way to the kingfisher
is a serpentine line
beneath multiple skies
beginning in a canyon
dark with the scent of winter apples
where all night the wind
sweeps between
the orchard's thin white trees
speaking a language
stripped to vowels
then descending
through rain-black clouds
to look back at the blue
that slides between them
when they part. It leads
through the sacaton grass
with sparrows in a flock,
cleaves to the river,
withdraws into December
cottonwoods half concealing
red-tailed hawks,
twists to open space
and meadowlarks then ties
a final knot around the pond
where the journey ends,
grey ripples gnaw the banks
and a small green bird
snaps into focus
perched on silence.
ISBN 1-59661-043-3
74 pages/$15
In finely crafted poems as clear as the carefully ground lens of a birdwatcher’s binoculars, David Chorlton cautions us to consider: Now you are the last of your kind in this place. With time running out for thousands of species and ecosystems collapsing, Waiting for the Quetzal is required reading.—CHRISTINA PACOSZ
It has been a joy to read David Chorlton’s new book. It sharpens our sense of nature and awareness of responsibility toward the earth and other cultures and species. Chorlton’s aesthetic reminds me of W. H. Hudson, who proclaimed, “I’m not one of you damned writers: I’m a naturalist from La Plata.” Hudson and his friend Ford Madox Ford “had a deep, dark, permanent rage at the thought of any cruelty to birds.” Chorlton’s book exalts birds, reminding us that their songs are to awaken us as well as themselves. He agrees with those great writers that birds should not, “in their beauty and rareness, be driven from the world.” It takes efforts of poets like Shelley, Hopkins, and Chorlton to help those birds awaken and heal us in time for us to save them too.—DAVID RAY,
author of The Endless Search: A Memoir