What do I love more than what I imagine is my singular life?*

The promise of an eternal life
That within me somewhere is an Eternal Spirit

To know that spirit or soul as real
to ride her strength out of this life and into the next Great Whatever

And here I am
In myself again
In my singular life

I’ve been seeing the cycle forever…
Gathering baby birds from the ground
Putting them into a cardboard box
Pleading with my mother to tell me how to save it
Her face
Her face slowly nodding

“Oh babe
It’s nature”
And seemingly she doesn’t even try to help

The next hours or day
I offer another stiff baby bird
to the ground
by myself, alone with the sun and the wind and songs of living birds
Under the willow, or maybe the lilacs
Places where I go alone
Even then
Small and young
And unaware that this life had an end point
Living In my eternity

The great stream rushing through a small body
A new mind
Showing up as an urgency to help
To get the cigarettes out of my mother’s mouth
To get the shame off of my grandmother
To stop the cat from killing the bird
To get my brothers to stop hating
And my father to simply take a breath

I believe Nature is eternal
That’s about all I can believe at this time

So maybe it’s Nature that I will come to actually love more than my singular life,
as this body drops away, and
hopefully something else slips off into eternity.

*Inspired by the poem:
What the Silences Said, by Marie Howe