There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is someting infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.

-Rachel Carson, 1906-1964, American Biologist, Writer

Robin's Egg

love
I watched her come
day after day
to the Alberta Pine
beside my front door

Building with dried grass
small twigs, pieces of
my son’s hair (he’d just
had an outdoor haircut)

And mud
I wondered how she
carried the mud

From a chair
by the picture window
I saw her smooth
and compress the crisscrossed
creation with her breast

When it was
perfect and padded
and remarkably round
she laid – at great effort –
the first egg

I saw it new
its indescribable blue
shell still covered with
small rips of white membrane
from The Passage
sun shone on the blue
adding a glimmering
spot of white

The next day there was
another egg
the day after that
another: a trinity of eggs
perfectly nesting in the nest

Then, surprise, a fourth
“Four eggs!” I told my daughter
“I’ve never seen four before!”

The foursome squished into
the round seemingly fighting
for position until a day later
when I found one of the eggs

Dislodged from the nest
cradled in greening branches
of our tiny pine

“What should I do?” I asked
my husband. “Put it back
in the nest?”
“Maybe she pushed it out,”
he said.

When the Robin left
to dig a wiggly meal
I retrieved the egg from
its cradle bow

In my hand
it was cold and heavy
with promises that would
never be trued

I felt like crying over the egg
and over all the indescribably
smooth, blue and beautiful
things that have fallen,
too soon, out of my own nest