Special Providence in the Fall of a Robin

As I was walking down my sidewalk today,

Ruing the cold and the damp of a June day in Canada,

I came upon a robin - a fledgling. Its long

Hop-about legs, incongruous in a three dimensional being

Now and fatally trapped in a two dimensional world.



I don’t know whether the three white dollops it left behind

Were deposited out of fear or time but I saw them as a harbinger

Of ill and resignation. That my flightless visitor’s life

Had gone to shit – he seemed to tremble as I bent to catch

A better look at his condition – was there in blistered white.



I thought to pick him up and take him to the comfort of my home

But all the resignation in his eyes, like I was free to claim him,

Tear him, steal his fragile treasure, made me pause and wonder.

Was I to be the agent of death to deliver the judgment of nature

On a misstep or a parent’s momentary inattentiveness?



Was I his personal Doctor Death dispatched to hasten his dispatch

And spare him from the cruelty of claw or tooth or beak

With one swift blow or executioner’s twist of his frail neck?

And I thought, do I shy away from being nature’s hangman

Because I have convictions about life or is it fear and cowardice?

Do I shy away from causing death because I am afraid to live

And eschew the bloodying of my hands because I fear to touch

The essence of being – without my comfortable words and thoughts

To buffer the pain of essence and truth and realities and finalities?

The fledgling, in the meantime, ignored my existential weltering.



He scurried off on bandy orange legs scuttling like a washerwoman

With her skirts and aprons hoisted high and so he seemed

To gather up his body and his feathers with his too short wings

And scuttle to the branches of a low slung spruce

Hiding his awkward swollen-belly frailty in its needle down breast



I found him later in the grass, earthbound and distressed

I looked for him again that afternoon but he was gone

I heard a robin singing in the branches overhead and wished

Against all odds that he had found his sky, a wish that seemed

To echo in the song of its parent singing his child to sleep.