This is a poem I wrote after having observed a Carolina wren on my front porch.

She had built a nest with her partner and then after a few weeks, I could hear the baby nestlings whistling sounds and she was coming and going all the time, feeding them. Then one night, we had a cold frost come in, and the following day, the nestling sounds had disappeared. The nestlings had died. That wren came day after day in a frantic state, trying to feed them. The male wren had not come back to the nest either and she was left alone.

This scene, so sad, stirred up so much in me. It stirred up all the pain I felt in trying to conceive and building a dream of what it all was going to be like, me as a new mother. I never got the chance to build my nest of life and my dream of having biological children was never realized.

I laid it all inside
so intricately, with grass and twigs
moss and hair, an overwhelming instinct driving on,
through unsure years
It took my love for you to hasten forward
in the natural ebb and flow of things,
intwinedall my soul
I gave
that deep reservoir of pain
I could no longer hold,
The death pull, and the rumblings of hope somehow sounded
in that far off, dark,protruding sky
I held on, with the possibility
that curse wouldn’t penetrate
everything
We planned the days, the countless hours of created
life, the cries, the warm skin, the soft blankets,
The feel of breath on my neck, the soft heart beating
in rhythm of mine
What all humans come to?
eventually,
ordained?
or without thought or care,
it was everything, yearning and pleading to take away the blight
butseeping in, the death chill
without a whisper of hint
frozemy fragile dream
and calling out, through days, and weeks, and years
to no avail
I tried in despair to mend the holes
rework the frame and listen for the cries of life
praying for mercy
for that
nest of death
buried
with my mother instinct
in folded wings and swollen eyes, praying for the newly dead
to rise anew.

Rebekah A. Schweizer

February 2022