ManicDDaily

Sparrow Dreams

My child is a sparrow.

The other women hold their babes in arms; I cup mine in my palms, gently, for she is a sparrow, so fragile that I am afraid that I will crush her if I hug, though sometimes I run my forefinger over her small brown head, feeling the soft downiness above brittle skull.

We sit on a bench at Rockefeller Center; it is a grey day, the air only a few shades lighter than the buildings.  Our concrete bench is also grey, speckled with black grains, like crumbs of tar, sand, black hole, mixed with the cement; the sculpted box hedge at my back has, at its hollow depths, silvery branches.

She is not even a baby bird.  As I hold her in my palm, she tilts her head, her eyes bead bright, while the babies of the women around me goggle fleshily; their mothers cooing over them with full-echo cheeks.

I try not to feel less significant.  So, my child is a sparrow.

Then, suddenly, for some reason I cannot  place, I put her down, there, at my side, on the grey stone bench.  I stand, brush my hair back from my face, breath in a space of grey white air.  When I turn about again, she is gone; her soft keel of breast and wing nowhere to be seen.

I search the bench, the bushes; I tug the arms of the women who mill about me.

I cry, I weep, I despair.   The fact that she is a bird means nothing to me now, only that she is gone, my child, my only, my dear.

I wake up weeping. My hands, in the velvet grey of night-morn sheets, trace the soft hard curve of my belly, which is still there, still pregnant.

But all is changed, all is forever different, and I weep on, for I know now that what I am being given is something which may be lost, and that it is a loss that, unlike the child itself, I will not ever be able to bear.

And how, I wonder, will I be able to hold her when she comes–for I know that I must not grip tightly, though she can take flight–

So hard my heart is beating, so fast–

National Poetry Month!  Open Link Night at DVerse Poets Pub!  (Check it out!)  The above which I’m calling a prose poem for these purposes is actually based on a draft poem that I wrote the third day of LAST YEAR’s National Poetry Month.  To view the original, click here!