this morning you wear
the tailored rust vest with charcoal underneath
your straw-thin legs topped with white cuffs
milky eyeliner encircles, dark eyes

you take four steps, tilt your head
as if to eavesdrop on blades of grass
reaching down, you retrieve a morsel
before three more steps
then plunge your bill into the soil

your legs, straining, leaning backward, pulling
just barely enough ballast
to extract a length of worm
drowning half, then the remainder

you are on heralding Spring
a few steps at a time

Connie Johnson's poetry has appeared in Leaves of Poetry; Father, Grandfather and Me; The Hidden Cache and Arizona’s State Poetry Society’s Sandcutter. In 2016 she won the Inland Empire’s California Writers Club Poetry Contest. Connie currently lives in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.