Where in the spirit world
have you taken up lodging
and do you still ply your wings
as you did on this earth?


Do you still dine—wherever you’ve gone—
on mast, growing fat and strong
to flee from predators faster 
than any auto on earth, a century ago?


Not far from here, old fields flourish
gone to meadow these forty years
next to a strip of forest
where you would have nested and feasted
on raspberries	greenbrier
hickory nuts	and acorns


But we humans, driven to build
cut down the forests of oak and beech
cut short your search for breeding grounds.
Starved of habitat
photographed, documented
billeted in the Cincinnati Zoo
the last of your kind consigned 
to the Red List: Category Extinct.


⸺

This article appears in November 2026.

Lynne Viti’s fourth poetry collection is The Walk to Cefalù. She is a faculty emerita in the Writing Program at Wellesley College, and serves on the Board of the New England Poetry Club.