Nesting
1 Minute Read Time
When the birds’ names doubled with words that summoned
ideas from their hiding places (the flicker, the chat, the swift, the lark),
I watched them more closely, confident that somewhere
a thought would escape the bird, buoyed upon a pun,
and I’d find meaning in a world that glided
above me, dipping hardly into my mind.
When I saw a swallow’s nest balanced on a truss
like an idea teetering upon a word,
I waited for the mother-swallow to return
with her twigs, her blade of grass, her strand of yarn.
What idea would nestle there?
Later, when the babies pecked themselves out of shells,
I watched their open-beaked pleas and wondered
how sustenance entered such desperate mouths
and how they swallowed.
I believed in no gods, and when words with different meanings
echoed themselves, I felt I lived inside a poem someone else had made,
and I rhymed with every bird on my line.
Read more from Issue 19.2.
