Thirteen Ways of Looking at Birds Migrating at Night, by Dick Westheimer

With lines by Miriam Liedvogel, director of the Institute of Avian Research

I.
Tonight, above my home,
the only moving thing
is a single song sparrow.

II.
Some are alone
and have no one to follow.
Others are songbirds
migrating north.

III.
Electrons favor hanging out in pairs
as do I
and can lead to an electron 
moving from one molecule to another,
to me moving from our bed to my bed.

IV.
Sleep is a quantum thing
where the smallest bodies
are disturbed if observed.

V.
95% of migrating birds travel at night, 
alone, 
without parental guidance.

VI. 
We all dream
alone, 
I must have been 10 when,
sleepless,
I ask my mother,
“How do you fall asleep?”
She didn’t understand.

VII.
I so often write about love,
death and the changing of the seasons
and rarely about the hours 
toiling away in the night, unseen, 
rowing a boat through the dark sea of the sky.

VIII.
The sparrow finds its way
in the night sky
and returns to the nesting place it left
last autumn. It is a mystery
that I wake in the same bed
I dreamt in all night.

IX. 
If dreams were foliage,
I wish I was
like a beech
that holds on
to its leaves
into spring
when everything
else has awakened.

X.
A woodpecker wakes before
I do. She ratta-tap-taps first light 
into being. The sparrow
settles into a cavity
high up in the locust to sleep. 

XI.
There is nothing 
that piques my desire 
more than the nest
of sheets
still warm
from where 
my lover slept.

XII.
The magnetic field sensed
by the bird is too weak to follow
unless, via a quantum of light 
in the dark of their eye.
The sparrow sees 
without seeing
where to go.

XIII.
It was night all morning 
for the sparrow. The woodpecker
finds a beetle under the bark
of the locust. The sun
raises its head from the pillow
of dawn and proclaims the day
into being.

–

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Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Rattle Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in ONLY POEMS, Whale Road Review, Rattle, Amsterdam Quarterly, One Art and Vox Populi. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com.

© 2026, Dick Westheimer