It is just after 5:00 a.m. as I browse among the books that prop up my life. I say prop because books are so often a means of leaving my surroundings, tuning out, turning off. I say prop, but more accurately, they are the existential nail on which I hang my time and effort. Poetry, mostly—Ron Rash, Ted Kooser, Wendell Berry, Kari Gunter-Seymour. Mountain words, plains words, red clay words, river words. Places where I am utterly myself and utterly absent in this fading night whose silence is suddenly shattered by the rattling of a bird feeder.

There will be no reading or writing this morning because it is not the obedient bear foraging for seed (I just toss a tennis shoe towards him and he leaves with the measured dignity of a butler), but raccoon. Two of them. In a flash of cognitive dissonance, I realize this is the first time I have ever seen these typically loner creatures work in pairs. I’ve also never appreciated the snowy white halo around their masks, sort of like a moon dog. I let them eat for a bit, then attempt to menace them with noise. They are far more persistent than bear.

Ironically, I’ve just read an author who mentions cherishing his “first time” experiences of outdoors. First time hearing coyote yip like weaned puppies in the distance, first time seeing the way a growing tree will capture a strand of barbed wire strung too close to it, or discovering the slide path of a beaver. First time feeling a warm air stream, like some ribbon of tropical ocean, cut between two cold hills. And now this odd couplet of bandits double-teaming the sunflower seed, making a ghostly debut as a duo, worthy of pause and notice as any sabbath. It isn’t even daylight yet, but it is nearly Spring and all manner of critters are on the move, emerging from dens and deep sleep to claim their share of life. I’ve been called to attention, out on the porch where Jupiter blazes in the southern sky, and two defiant faces hold a message for me in their teeth: You have just this one life, it would be a shame not to show up for it.

In Late Winter

A raccoon is a bold creature
by every measure,
slow to git if he pays
you any mind at all.
Things are on the move
this time of year, even ice
has somewhere to go,
running off over hills to carve
ditches and fill creeks.
I stomp on the sidewalk
and see him lose a few
seeds as he turns. It’s hard to hold
onto things in this life,
if you ease up even a moment,
the mica gleam of fur
might slip by you in the moonlight.

Sharon Perkins Ackerman’s third poetry collection Sweeping the Porch (Pine Row Press) will be published in early 2026. Her poems have appeared in the Southern Humanities Review, Atlanta Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Appalachian Places, Broad River Review, Kestrel, Salvation South and many others. She is the winner of the Hippocrates Poetry in Medicine award (London, 2019) and poetry co-editor for Streetlight Magazine.