The grebe builds its nest
in a compost heap,
a basket of dead and rotting plants
sending up ripples of heat
to warm the eggs.

My mother might not have known this
when she built a compost pile
below our rabbit hutch.
But she knew how to squeeze every bit of value
from what she had.

Child of the Depression,
wearer of hand-me-downs,
she learned thrift
at her mother’s knee.
What we call creative reuse
she called necessity.
What we call waste reduction
she and the grebe learned as survival.

This piece started with today’s Poetic Earth Month challenge from Tweetspeak Poetry: to write a poem about something we can learn from other species to handle a climate change challenge. The photo, by the way, is not of a grebe.