Photo credit: Tom Gill. on VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND

When I wrote this lyric/personal essay back in February, I didn’t have W.S. Merwin in mind. When I heard that he died yesterday, I went back and read his 1967 poem “For a Coming Extinction” and realized it must have been in the back of my mind. So I’ve decided to dedicate the essay to him and to go ahead and publish “Bird Feeder Simulation” on Medium instead of waiting around to get permission from the journals I submitted it to.

You can read W.S. Merwin’s “For a Coming Extinction,” here.

And you can read my essay, “Bird Feeder Simulation,” here.