Nesting: an early poem from years ago

Late last night, a beloved former neighbor, digging around in her attic, finds a poem I'd written for her daughter years ago and take the time to type it for me.


"Nesting," I'd called it. This long-time obsession with birds.

Nesting
(For Hae Linn)

In high summer
A Christmas cactus
Awkwardly hung
And nested
With finch.

I believe you were seven
When they
Broke into life,
And blind-eyed,
Panicked for the light.

At dusk,
When the air cooled,
We would pull their roosting down
To find the fur and murmurs
Redefined.

Though still too young,
They yearned to fly
And in the last
They, in a tremble,
Bent wings between the sky.

We spent the night
In search of
Cactus-sown finch:
You certain they would survive;
I, silently, not...

Though, perhaps, in another form,
They did,
If once more redefined
And mindless
Or the fragments left behind. 

Today is the last day that Nest. Flight. Sky.: On Love and Loss One Wing at a Time, my Shebooks memoir, can be downloaded for free, the details here.

(It goes without saying that that is no finch in the photo, but a miniature owl I encountered in southeast Alaska.)