Of healing little birds - Tanya Presse

I thought you were a bird

with a broken wing

and that I was two hands inviting you in.

I listened to your squeaky whimper,

feeding you from the knowledge

in my ancestral bones

of healing little birds.

Your wing wouldn’t heal and

you hid from my hands,

afraid of their potential force,

of their fractures.

I called, I screamed, in fear that

You were hurting in a cold, dark corner.

In fear, I had grown used to your company.

And now, I am in fear, alone.

I thought I found you

when your little head popped forth,

when, together, we learned about our broken selves.

I watched you, trusting,

hop away to another bird,

still with broken wing.

Abandoned,

I realized I am not two outstretched hands

but another broken dove with broken wing,

broken at a new joint,

at the loss of you.

I will mend, I am mending.

Even though you plucked my feathers,

I choose

to carry a piece of you still.

We could have tended our breaks,

our wings, together.

You hobbled away.

Left hobbled.

Extending a hand to touch,

extending a wing to flight,

is a danger

of a fateful fall.

Vulnerability, they say.

Hearts broken, they say.

I will mend. I will mend. I will mend.

---

Tanya Presse is a writer of fiction and poetry. She's been writing since the proverbial existential crisis brought her to find solace in not just reading but in writing words. Her work has been read on a stage for emerging writers at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival and appeared in Glimmer Train. She lives with her three girls, two of them tiny humans and one of them a furbaby.