An owl is hooting.
An owl is hooting.
Great horned owl
in tall white pine.
Now an answering owl,
then another
from farther away.
Dusk has blackened
the branches of the pines.
The car’s headlights
stare at the white garage
with owl eyes.
We are listening to the owls,
we are saying goodbye—
nodding, speaking our lines,
my son and his girlfriend
and I. They get in the car,
tires crackle goodbye.
An owl hoots.
Then one, then another.
I am tired of
my mother tongue.
–
Jennifer Stewart Miller is the author of Thief (2021), winner of the 2020 Grayson Books Poetry Prize, and The Strangers Burial Ground (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, RHINO, Spillway, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.