Snipe Hunting
My uncle handed me a sack
and sent me to the yard:
“Just hold it wide; they’ll fall inside—
this hunting isn’t hard!”
What did I know? A girl of six
believes what she is told.
That August night in ‘68
I really thought I’d hold
a snipe before the stars appeared.
Instead, my uncle laughed
as I became mosquito bait
with rustling paper kraft.
It’s either faith or foolishness
that keeps me at this call.
The bag is now a flattened sheet:
I wait for words to fall.
Baltimore-area native Ann Eichler Kolakowski is pursuing a master’s degree in poetry at Johns Hopkins University. Her recent work also appears in Little Patuxent Review and Blast Furnace. She is completing a book-length manuscript of poems that chronicle the lost mill town of Warren, Maryland, which was destroyed and flooded in 1922 to expand the Loch Raven Reservoir, the primary source of Baltimore’s municipal water supply.
