The mother bird was often tired,
foraged for worms, the bushes, grass,
the fallen trees, rotting wood
in the grip of rainy days.
Each day was undistinguished like the one before
with wheels, wheels. Chicks cried and cried.
She knew the wheel of circling about,
never far away from the nest, never reaching for
the clouds, never skirting the forest’s edge,
until, it seemed, something else moved and flew
instead of the one she once intimately knew.
The weather had warmed up, a sliver of light
pierced through the leaves hugging the nest,
and pierced through her, like some distant thought
at once familiar and strange,
some poignancy perhaps unveiling her delight
in which was lodged some thorn,
lodged a feeling akin to what one feels
while recalling young love, the recollection
of which is at once delicious and sad.
The chicks fed, she felt some power
pull her upward, pull her beyond
the limit of her forest, pulled her more
upward still until she became
the sunshine’s winged thought or dream,
until she became the weaver
of what may have been the sunshine’s theme,
an extension maybe of the sun’s desire.
For some inexplicable something, all afire,
impelled her flight, a mind
flummoxed yet filled with delight.
Yet something by and by
pulled her downward,
her flight downward glowing like an arc
of a bow that seemed as though
it might have been a master archer’s dream.
For she returned
to her nest, and her chicks’ eyes had
magic enough. She later saw
a dewdrop sliding down a blade of grass
when she went out foraging again,
glittering glass,
reflections, rainbow light…
She hadn’t lost anything in her downward flight,
but the light of the sky found
itself most fully in her who now
circled her nest again and saw her ground.
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