The Raided Nest
       

Her ritual of raiding was to wait
and watch until the young had fled their nests
and left behind their flattened, emptied shells.

She knew her catalog of trees as well
as every dusty corner of her room,
whose walls she decorated with the blues

of robins ' eggs, mosaics of the sky
and, in the browns of sparrows' eggs, the ground.
She stepped barefoot onto the loamy earth;

around her toes it yielded as she stepped,
shaped by her silent, wary shifts of weight.
Then underneath a nest she'd known for weeks,

just low enough that she could reach its lip,
just high enough that she would have to stretch
to get at anything inside, she stopped

and wondered once again how from a twig
and just the proper yield of tree they wove
defenses and a balanced world of warmth.

When she reached in to pull the eggshells out
she felt the feathers, soft but flattened down
and dried, worm-eaten. Nothing would return.

She brought the whole nest to her waiting walls,
her years of cracked and reconnected shells.
She painted over eyes that never knew

the pastures' greens, the art of shaping earth
to fit their body's welfare and their world,
but knew instead too soon the mouldering brown.

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Copyright © 2018 Thomas March All rights reserved
from Aftermath
The Word Works
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission