1 post / 0 new
157th Weekly Poetry Contest honorable mention: A Gospel of Birds

by Sarah Russell

She wasn’t sure about heaven,
but she believed in birds.
On
walks she’d stop to watch
a skein of
geese,
wondered
where they came from,
where they were heading.
They mate for life, she’d say.
Crows do too. And swans
and storks. She must have said that
a hundred times, with a kind of wonder
at the impossibility.

She kept five feeders on the deck,
had a book of backyard birds
to identify newcomers at the feast.
She cried when a neighbor’s cat
killed a mourning dove. They mate
for life too, she said. Listen,
her mate is sad. That’s just their call,
I told her. No, it’s different, she said.
You can tell when birds are sad.

She died a month ago.
I keep the feeders filled.

First published in Psaltery and Lyre

157th Weekly Poetry Contest