In the Dark, with Gifted Voice

We thought them a nuisance, those clouds of moths
that circled our porch light and swarmed past us
into the house when we came in at night.

Something changed in their world, small, unnoticed
until the moths left or died—no longer
tapping at screens to reach the inside lamps

each summer night—bodies which smudged fingers
and walls with powdery scales fine as ash
no longer smeared on windshields and headlights,

no longer scooped up by the whippoorwills
who nested in our gravel drive. I sit
in my old porch rocker near our woodland

and miss the voices of the whippoorwills.
They are gone, those gentle birds of the dark,
their evening chant an air a small child could learn.

They sang long into the night, loud and clear,
strong tenors chiming through the oaks and pines
and my bedroom window and through the years.

It was no symphony but a folk song,
a three-note burden that a child of five
learned with ease and whistles now at twilight.