We’re all real sorry. We couldn’t have known you were sleeping inside one of our canoes. When you and your brother or sister spilled out onto the cold gravel flailing naked and terrified, blind as fire, calling out for Mom, we didn’t know what else to do but scoop you back into the nest, pat it down, and put you on top of one of the trailers.
There was talk of rehabilitation. But what could we do? We were working, and we doubted the birders would take you in. Afterall, “They’re just robins,” someone later said. You’re not some brightly colored finch having come up from the Caribbean. Your song is not vibrato. Your migration isn’t all that threatened. There’s a hundred birds that look just like you on 33rd street.
I assume you are dead now. We did our best to scoop you in with our fleece jacket sleeves, but you splayed out like a ragdoll, wings limp as a broken finger, so helpless. Did your Mom come back home? Did our stench set her away from you?
I wonder where all the animals like you — the rats, the flees, the vultures, the wild hogs, the colorless, uncharismatic faces who never made it onto advertisements or wildlife campaigns — where do you go when you die?
When I think about that, I also think of the movie, “Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter.” I know it sounds stupid, but I can’t help but smile a little when, in the movie, Mary Lincoln says to her beaten up husband, “I think common looking people are the best in the world. That’s why the good lord made so many of them.”
But you were not really common. Not you. You’re not a robin, but a bird. A baby bird. A baby. A thing young enough to live in eternal amazement and terror ofyour canopied world and its hollow nights, its warm, light mornings, still shocked each morning when the sun rises. Look, Mom. The sun came back for us.
No one will have heard your voice.
