swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

a small stone weighs much more
Margot Wizansky

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Backlash

In Newfoundland, the constancy
of fog. Thousands upon thousands
of pelagic birds share the sea stacks

in the stink—murres protect their eggs
on the narrowest ledge, gannets plunge-dive, raucous,
gulls food-snatch, egg-snatch.

Puffin pairs fail to hatch one egg,
launch one chick. Whales are thrown off course
searching for food, polar bears wander through town.

Baby seals throw themselves on Twillingate Beach to die.
A campaign was mounted to save them. That ancient hunt
forbidden, they multiply and multiply,

eat and eat. The more we save, the more die
of starvation. A hurricane topples
the massive rig looking for oil in the sea.

After the oil spill, the loons

They’re hardest to wash. How tenuous
they are, black and matted, intricate
barbules in disarray, dotted breasts gummed

with the black of greed. We feed them
a slurry, fill eight basins, the first,
pure liquid soap, the second, diluted

with a little water, and so on, until
the last basin, clear and warm.
In the first basin, we hold one by the legs

while we scrub its body, swab its eyes,
trying not to scare it. We move it to
the second basin and slowly down the line.

They tremble. We hear none of their
tremolo or wail. They try to hide
their heads under their wings.

In a wading pool protected by mesh,
we encourage them to preen.
Without their natural oils, they drown.

Most of them we lose anyway,
no matter how careful we are,
how quiet.

When I kneel down

The Tablelands, Gros Morne, Newfoundland

The mantle, heaved up six hundred
million years ago. Or five hundred million,
millions dropped, just like that.

A small stone weighs much more
than I expected, heavy metal,
iron and chromium, toxic, inhospitable.

Yet, when I kneel down, here is moss,
alive in a bit of dirt caught by wind.
Grey grasses, poking through, wait for

a few drops of rain to turn green.
Junipers grow flat, trunks keeping
to the ground. And flowers—

the pitcher plant’s flute-full
of insects, and the tiniest allium,
flushed, abiding.

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Margot Wizansky’s chapbook, Wild for Life, was recently published with Lily Poetry Review Books (2022). Her poems have appeared on line and in many journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Ruminate, River Styx, Cimarron, and elsewhere. She edited two anthologies: Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House, and Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains. She won two residencies, one with Writers@Work in Salt Lake City and also with Carlow University in Sligo, Ireland. Margot has recently retired from a career developing housing for adults with disabilities. She lives in Massachusetts.