fledgling ovenbird You are only testing your wings when you meet melted silica instead of the trees your eyes insisted were there. I abandon my breakfast, run outside, find your body twisted at the bottom of a gravel filled hole covered with a large grate. Everyone says, "there's nothing to be done" but I can't stop thinking about the way your chest rose and fell with such panicked fluttering, the way your feet twitched. I feel your agony along my own spine. I go back to check on you assuming you'll be still and silent but you're not. You're standing with eyes open. I can't leave you down there. I pull off the grate, lower myself into the hole that is almost as deep as I am tall. I scoop up your body in a towel and raise you to the level of the ground then struggle to rescue myself. Once we are both on the grass I hold you in my hands and cry. You seem so broken. When I touch your feathers with a finger they are so soft I can't even feel them with my world roughened skin. I watch you breathe. I watch your eyes open and close. I wait for the world to show me what to do. With your body held close to my chest I let my heart find a path forward. You are a fledgling robin, I confirm that with a bird app. This means that you must not be far from home. I start looking for a nest. My eyes take in everything--a snake in the grass, three baby rabbits, a Western Tanager with a head like a flash of red montbretia. And then I see it--a nest tucked away in the roof of the woodshed. I watch a male and female robin visit the nest. I see the hopeful mouths of the nestlings wide open and waiting. You hop onto my hand. It seems you have more energy and I begin to hope, I let myself see a future where you might live. You flap your wings a little. I can feel the needles of your claws clinging to my fingers. They are so sharp and so gentle and so perfect. A stick in the woodshed is long enough to reach the nest. I move you to the end and you cling to it. I call in reinforcements with longer arms than mine and we raise you to the edge of the nest. When you hop right in I can hardly believe it and I want to cry again but this time because maybe all is not lost. I've checked on you a dozen times. The adults come to feed the nestlings but ignore you. I'm beginning to think that I've just saddled these parents with a baby that isn't theirs but they don't force you out. By late morning you look comfortable. At least you have the safety of the nest and the warm bodies of others of your kind and a chance to rest. You sweet little injured thing. The world is already pitting itself against you, cracking the fine porcelain of your skull against invisible cruelties. I hope that in the moments you were held safe in the palm of my hand you learned that there is kindness too. In the late afternoon you are gone. I wish for you welcoming skies, a place to roost, eggs blue and precious as topaz, wings that rest straight and true along your back. And when you fly to your nest to feed the chicks that have hatched into their own wild and dangerous future I hope that some tiny part of you will remember me. 250708 what's it to you? who go blather from