Lost Songs by Meg Weston

In a restaurant in Italy they dine

on songbirds. A delicacy – so delicious—

they say, crunching the tiny

bones and heads in their mouths,

spitting out the beaks.

Birds fly paths of migration

traveled for thousands of years,

their routes leading them to us,

trapped in nets and served up

on our tables—

Each year the flocks grow more scant

fainter songs, more haunting.

The delicacy increasingly rare, illicit,

more costly and sought after.

Our greed more evident—

I listen for their ghostly echoes, lost songs

that wander through waves of air,

wondering that I didn’t know ‘til now—

a third of the birds in the world now gone—

industrial sites once breeding grounds.

While I continue to drive my car,

on routes mere decades old

though I travel far too often.

I’m afraid it may too late, my ears too deaf

to hear our pending extinction.

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Meg expresses her passion for volcanoes, geology and story in poetry, non-fiction, and photography. She completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Lesley University in 2008. In January 2020, following a successful career in business and media, Meg retired from her recent position as President of Maine Media Workshops + College. She is the co-founder of www.thepoetscorner.org, and her work can also be found on her website www.volcanoes.com.