The heart is a concussed cardinal

No thing really needs us. Not the ladybug crawling on my wall, the stink bugs I continually throw out the door or the stunned cardinal I cradled and placed in a nest made of paper towels inside a shoe box after her collision with the window. Best to let nature handle it, to wait for her to “come around”. But because my yard is in the cat zone I had to go out after twenty minutes and move her. (I don’t need to start my month with that on my mind.) She didn’t try to get away as I spoke low to her It’s okay, it’s okay and then took the box to the garage where it was quiet and dry and warm. I set a timer for and hour and a half and Googled animal rescue and wild bird sanctuary in case she needed more help. When the men from the Salvation Army came to pick up a donation, I went to move her from the shelf in the garage and I heard one peep, two peeps and then a lot of box activity. I took her to the deck, put her down and opened the box, she hopped onto the edge. I left, showed the two men what they were here for, went through my standard banter: Do you like the job, are you staying busy, do you have a lot of pickups today. When they finished and drove off, I went back out to the deck. She was still on the box, facing the rest of the birds, I started to lift the box to the railing and that’s when she turned her head and looked at me and flew off.

Whew.  

Wouldn’t it be nice if it was possible to put all worries inside a box until they were ready to fly away? Maybe if we treated those worries like injured beings, we’d be kinder about them, more willing to look for how to help. I think about what size of box I’d need for some of these. Is the hardened worry about my son fitting for a ring box, it’s concentration and clarity closer to diamond than not; does it get the giant sleep-eating monster size box that Sweetums might require? Like the bird in a box metaphor would there be a signal when it’s time to open the lid? What’s the shelf life of estrangement? Is there an Estrangement Anonymous group? Can I start the EA charter? The heart is open in two sections, the old much scarred full of baggage and regret and the new full of fresh wounds and double regrets.  One part of my heart knows it will never have to beat the same, the other hopes it can, please, please beat the same again. Sigh.

The heart is a concussed cardinal nesting on Bounty and waiting to feel better so it can fly away.

That’s a sad poem. Here’s a another, that is sadder for that ending. 😐

Poem for a son, the T-shirt

The tag reads: “Wash in your mother’s tears.”
If you remember what her hands smelled
of as she tucked you in, perhaps your
own tears will well and spill. Don’t be ashamed.

Two vivid moments: one the joy, joy like bird
flight or that orange light of dawn after a hard
storm of waking to your smile. And now the opposite:
despair. What to say to hear your voice.

This is the soup of emotion the heart swims in,
despair that makes you write soup of emotion:
that kind of thing.