Lament for a Rose-Breasted Grosbeak

State Botanical Garden, Athens, Georgia
April 25, 2019

He died in the height of a Georgia spring 

on a garden morning green as Eden 

when the slant of sunlight warms the wings

and lifts a feast of flying insects. 

Far from his tropical winter retreat, 

he'd crossed the Gulf on a perilous night 

and followed unfolding canopy north,

drawn toward summer breeding grounds. 

But never made it. In a spell of delight 

he dipped below a break in the woods, 

swooping and swerving for food, for joy. 

Wide blue skies were in his sight. 

The end was abrupt. 

He banked hard into high glass –

dead before he hit the ground. 

Rose-breasted beauty fell at my feet. 

I cradled his warmth in my aging hands 

to will his broken body back. My hope 

was vain – billions fall in the flyways 

in a world diminished bird by bird. 

Will You Come, Too?

When you look to the heavens for splendor 

    but encounter the night-black sky 

with islands of fire singeing an emptiness 

    thinning to void; 

when you turn to the earth for assurance 

    and consider the moss-bound boulder, 

witness to endless millennia, 

    parent of pebbles and dust; 

when you ponder your fragile life, 

    ephemeral as wren-song, 

tender as scent of jessamine 

    swept by a freshening wind; 

when you cling to the edge of immensity

remember your birth. 

    Your conception was always contingent. 

The odds of your mother were one in a million, 

    her mother much the same. 

You are the product of astrophysics,

    the toss of quintillion cosmic dice,

the orderly flow of atoms and energy 

  forged in the cores of stars. 

And you are a flesh-bound being of light,

    passion-child of chance and law,

a thirty-trillion-cell machine 

   of spit and dust, and dreams. 

Though the force of disorder breaks over all 

    and your atoms come unglued, 

the world in which you never were 

    is not the world that came to be. 

Woven from a wisp of time, 

    your mind was made to roam 

where death cannot constrain. Come 

    step beyond the temporal veil 

to claim the ancient eons 

    before our ancestors evolved. 

Come face the untold epochs 

    after our kind has passed. 

I am the voice of a universe, 

    and you – you are, too. 

The whole of time is before us.

    Will you come, too? 

Bubble Nebula - Hubble image by NASA