John Steele

The backyard is writhing. The ground—
that expanse of leaf litter and pine needles
where there is no grass and we are not
enslaved to a nonexistent lawn—it is
churning, roiling, leaves flipping into the air
like bubbles bursting in a pre-spaghetti
pot of water headlong toward boiling.

Wind? No wind.

But robins. Dozens of robins. Blitzing insects
by instinct, overwhelming worms in a whirl,
diving, divotting. Shocked and awed quarter acre,
almost Hitchcockian moment, collective nouns
insufficient: not a bashful blush of robins,
no insouciant bobbin of robins, no reliant,
not a rouge, not a breast or the rest.
There’s just no—

Ah. A riot of robins.

Not what you expect in your backyard,
even after snow and ice have melted,
and birds are aggressively aflutter, all just surviving.
Meanwhile in the wider world’s sadistic carnival mirror,
it is ICE running riot, federalized terrorists
puffed up in paramilitary plumage
in a feeding frenzy of their own cruelty.
Resistance. People with phone videos and whistles,
putting their lives in harm’s way.

Always the seasons turn. Be alert.
They are distressingly early this year,
the first fascists of spring.

John Steele, a North Carolina poet and writer, has studied creative writing at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He has been a teacher, a nonprofit tutor, a logistics coordinator, a high-ropes-course director, a warehouse technician, and, for one fateful day in the deepest, darkest, coldest recesses of January in southern Indiana, an arborist assistant. Poetry is the loose thread of sanity at which he cannot stop tugging.

This poem appears in Uprooted: Poems of Resistance, Witness, and Survival (The Chaos Section Poetry Project, Fall 2026). We’re sharing each poem from the collection individually over the coming weeks. You can read the full book or download the free PDF here.