When I worked for an editorial page, several emeritus (emeriti?) pundits still wrote an occasional column on the local, state and national issues about which they’d opined for decades. But little by little they ceased to offer incisive views on politics and policy and began to submit tone poems on the backyard bird feeder or their boyhood on the farm.

I flatter myself that I still have enough juice to comment on the passing scene, but the writer may be that last to know he belongs out to pasture. Still, when George Will was offered as column, he worried to his mentor and employer William F. Buckley, about whether he’d quickly run out of material. Buckley allayed his fears by saying, “I can think of two things a week that annoy me.” Me too.

But occasionally a different muse comes calling, and it would be churlish to reject her overtures. Her offerings rarely concern current events, and a good thing too. Andrew Marvell demonstrated conclusively that a carpe diem addressed to a coy mistress has a lot more staying power than a Horatian Ode addressed to Oliver Cromwell.

So, here are a few little quatrains containing birds and squirrels and the fruits of the earth. However, it has not escaped my notice, after the fact, that in a time dominated by terror, political dysfunction and unsettling change, even the orchard isn’t without its discontents.

Stolen Pleasures

In my yard stands a fig tree
That produces fine fruit.
Plucked straight from the boughs,
I suppose them juicy and sweet.

But just before the fruit turns
Fully ripe, or a ladder to climb
Can be fetched to lean on the trunk,
The birds and brown squirrels

Have feasted on figs, and their greed,
Has left me only a memory
Of imagined sweetness,
And a tree picked clean.