You should know of sparrows plumped by luminous trees
Of human brains taken over by their twitter of spring-day songs
By flocks swarming a single ambient thought
You would not know that insufferable summer day
A sparrow dropped by your house
I was sitting with you gone back to India
I took it in, saw it fluff up with the meanest eyes
I’ve seen I thought “What an aura!”
Only to learn after it died
That becoming large was just its way
To keep its cold-as-death body warm
My Buddhist gong
I hit to honor its passing
Making a bowl of sound larger than its body beside me,
It chills me to think
I’ve never thought of telling you
Where in your yard I buried it
Don’t you know at our one-in-many childhood homes
How featherless were the sparrow babies
That fell as they died from the dry India heat?
I picked up the one whose cries were
Both for birthing and dying
I probed as I do now to detect a beating heart
