Response to the “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” prompt:
That Little Bird
A Musing on Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Emily Dickinson
Like the scab I pick around the edges,
crusty blood thin over raw pink skin,
still sore at the center,
the wound always healing,
Days layer with tasks
that keep me on the earth,
ears ringing if I stop to listen
to the tune without the words
I am so afraid of those numbing
echo spaces growing
between synapses until
there’s nothing but quiet,
not even an ache of memory:
Warm sand between my toes,
the suck of waves receding,
the dance of sandpipers
at the edges where the froth
pulls back to expose the tiny holes,
so many. What’s under there?
I’ll watch the waves forever.
The clouds build on the horizon,
don’t forget, believe the little bird still
and settled, imprinted long ago.
A time I know I knew when I found
the robin’s egg, robin’s egg blue,
kept it warm in my hands
like a prayer, not really, but
let’s make the myth when I had wings.
A long time ago, before these words,
hope and me were a thing.
I didn’t know despair, though
my mother never held me,
even when I fell. Scolded me instead.
“Watch where you are going.”
I learned not to listen, built
the dirt ramps taller, lost the chain
to the bike that had already lost
its seat. The challenge to stand
and ride, build speed, bend my knees,
lean over the handlebars and turn
the bike to stop at the bottom.
My knees bore witness to the crash,
the one or two for every ten runs,
sometimes the blood running
down my bare shin into my socks.
I’ll hold that little bird,
a reminder to hold myself,
rock in the tide, wait to incubate.
I didn’t ask for this, no one does,
the happenstance of hope.
And here we are, making lists,
humming while the clock is ticking.
I know the Dickinson poem by heart, and feel the “tune without words” as a running theme and metaphor in my own lived experiences. I began with memories of risk-taking, against my mother’s detachment, a hope for connection, to live the words without the tune. I worked with quatrains, like Dickinson, and revised to keep close to the wound, the hope, the tune without the words.
Michelle Holland lives in Chimayó, New Mexico. Her poetry publications include “Event Horizon,” The Sound a Raven Makes, New Mexico Book Award for Poetry, Tres Chicas Press, and Chaos Theory, Sin Fronteras Press. Her books Circe at the Laundromat is forthcoming from Casa Urraca Press. Michelle is treasurer of New Mexico Literary Arts, and poet-in-residence at the Santa Fe Girls School.
The Zingara Project 