ON THE GRASSY EMBANKMENT BY THE BRIDGE IN BUFFALO BAYOU PARK

Just before sunset, we wait 
with couples, kids on bikes, entire families 
with toddlers in wagons. 

We gather for the bats—250,000 tiny mammals in all—
asleep in crevices beneath this bridge by day, 
coming out to feed at night. 

Above, two hawks 
circle and glide, 
reflected in high-rise glass. 

Children chatter and point 
as the first mothers and pups
rush from the colony.

We all gasp at the numbers 
lifting into the dim milk-blue sky, 
wave upon wave, 
forming clots 
and clouds
in churning cauldrons. 

And, they keep coming, 
chittering, driven by anxious hunger,
joining the swirling 
pointillist canvas, 
darting to avoid the raptors 
ready to feast. 

The bats will hunt along the bayou until dawn, 
consuming their body weight 
in mosquitoes, beetles, and gnats.

We root for the bats, but know
it’s a hawk eats bat 
eats mosquito world.  

We walk home 
behind a mother cradling and crooning to her baby,
a father holding his laughing son’s hand.

Diana Dinverno is the author of When Truth Comes Home to Roost (Celery City Chapbooks, 2022). Her work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Dunes Review, The MacGuffin, and other publications. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, and the recipient of the Michigan Poetry Society’s 2019 Margo LaGattuta Memorial Award, the Barbara Sykes Memorial Humor Poem Prize, and the 2022 Chancellor’s Prize. Dinverno, a life-long Midwesterner, has temporarily moved to Houston, Texas, where she works as an attorney. For more information, visit www.dianadinverno.com.