April is National Poetry Month in the U.S. and to celebrate, we're featuring contemporary poets

who write about our feathered friends. Tracy Brimhall is a professor of poetry at Kansas State

University. Her first published collection is called Rookery, and, naturally, it features a number

of poems about birds.

But Brimhall didn't grow up birding.

Her interest came later in life.

I did graduate school in New York City and then received a fellowship in Madison, Wisconsin, right after I graduated.

And I'd packed up my U-Haul and drove out of New York City with all of my belongings and the mountains in Pennsylvania flattened out into Ohio

and all of a sudden there was like a vulture eating a deer at the side of the road

and I saw red-winged blackbirds and I started to see all these things and I was like,

oh my gosh, they're not pigeons.

Not that there's anything wrong with pigeons, of course. They've appeared in her poems, too.

But Tracy has written about many different kinds of birds since that cross-country experience,

including one poem about a night jar, a kind of small bird that's most active at dusk and dawn.

This one is more allegorical or metaphorical of the end of a relationship.

Obad with a broken neck.

The first night you don't come home,

summer rains shake the clematis.

I bury the dead moth I found in our bed,

scratch up Arrudebaga and eat it rough with dirt.

The dog finds me and presents between his gentle teeth,

a twitching nightjar.

...