Note to a Sparrow

In childhood, chasing chidiyas round a room

was sport. Exhausted, you would fall and flutter.

I’d switch the fan off first to ward off doom;

I was a wanton boy… not a nutter.

We didn’t have a proper word for sparrow,

You were generic birds who lived at home,

Like dogs and sibs, but not as pets or kin,

Free to flit past Amma’s straight-and-narrow,

To feed and nest and roam,

To fly, while grounded mammals mooched within.

I haven’t raced you now in sixty years,

My children have no memories of you,

In times deranged by grand extinction fears

I wonder what the two of you will do.

I see your painted head and inky bib,

The twitchy way you tilt your head and cheep,

I see her face, pale eyebrowed and demure,

Your wife for life, this hot and flighty rib.

I see you in my sleep;

Awake, you are an absence I endure.

An absent sparrow is an awful thing,

An order of the ordinary gone,

The nightingale forgetting how to sing

Is not the same, the world will carry on.

I want you back inside my balcony

Astir within your made-to-measure nest,

Intent on kissing up a brood of you.

I’ll find an icon of Saint Anthony

To guard your sated rest,

You’ll be a sign the world is back in true.

Or not. Two fostered sparrows won’t repair

A broken world or douse the hidden fire

That fogs your balcony with charry air

And folds the earth into a poisoned gyre.

And yet, to share a common wall with you

To live adjacently will be a prize,

Because you’ll be this house’s soul, its numen.

I see you whir and light upon my shoe

Look up and meet my eyes,

And clock the mad conceit of being human.

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