Sunrise, black purple
scampers from yellow orange,

warming airs slurp dewdrops,
trees germinate new shadows,

and one ravenous red-bellied woodpecker
machine-guns the top of a metal lamppost

like Jimmy Cagney, "take that, you . . ."
Rat-a-tat, tat-tat,

Beak-launched bullets break
the afterglow of night-long incandescent light

Rat-a-tat, tat-tat
a metal massacre, pock-marked, riddled.

Avenger pauses, red-capped,
zebra-backed, white-rumped,

"Kwirr, kwirr."
Ten inches of temporary calm,

"Kwirr, chiv, chiv."
Human walks by.

Sweet Melanerpes carolinus,
simply a tapper of morse code, for all to hear.

Human shrinks in the distance,
sun angles up, bombardment resumes,

Fury of red and white and black -
A personal pogrom, tat-tat-tat . . . .

It must be that he eats
metal termites or juicy metal bugs,

But maybe he ate some worm
tainted with a deadly virus

that entered his brain and is slowly
chipping away at his faculty of reason.

- Bob Miller