The gray-haired man stands
mouth open in front of me
His eyes follow Blue Jay antics
then abandon that task
"They move too fast
they talk too much
they are terribly human"
gray-haired man walks away
camera in wrinkled hand
Away
back to brown log cabin
back to white feather bed
back to human places where
Blue Jays are smart enough
not to go
Immortal snapshot untaken
Blue Jays flight and swoop
unrecorded and the man
walks away
I wait and
watch the people who
watch the Blue Jays who
watch the squirrels who
watch me
I flash my mental camera and
find the film overexposed.
Judy Shepps Battle has been writing poems long before she became a psychotherapist and sociology professor at Rutgers University. Widely published both in the USA and abroad during the Sixties and Seventies, she deferred publishing to concentrate on career and family. Fortunately her muse was tenacious and she continued to write during the next three decades filling a file cabinet with scrawled and typewritten poems that are now being organized into chapbooks and individual submissions. The material submitted for publication represents her return to active participation in the writing community. She can't think of a better way to spend her retirement.