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