Monarch Chronicles

"A wheat season rain swells brooks and field.

Sparse bells echo from an ancient temple.

Broken moon hung over a far mountain." 

  – Li He, "Thirteen South Garden Poems"

1

Albany Wildlife Area still cricket-song

along the roadside cornfields midmorning.

Seventy-two in the shade, a dry field

breeze renders mosquitos homeless.

This is a lone Wisconsin prairie grassland

Untouched by tractor or trapper alike.

I count nineteen Monarchs, shards of sunlight, 

clapping at the tilted prairie thistle.