The Accident
The little bird flies straight into the side of the house and falls to the ground.
My daughter pulls away from me and runs to the little body, kneels in the grass
a horrified look on her face. “Is it dead?” she asks, over and over again
as I jog up to join her, slowly, hoping that the little bird
will wake up and flutter away before I can reach them
but it’s still lying on its back, in the grass, when I get there.
I tell my daughter not to touch the little body because I don’t know
if it’s sick, or if it’s broken anything, or if it’ll just wake up when moved
maybe attack her or something. I drag her back inside so we can look up
the myriad of reason birds fly into houses.
If birds are suicidal,
what would cause a bird to purposefully break its neck
against the side of our house? My daughter
loses herself in learning about sparrows, how many eggs they lay at one time
where they live, what makes them sad.
By the time we’re done researching birds
the sun has already gone down, it’s too dark outside to look for the little bird.
I tell my daughter we’ll look for the bird in the morning
and if it’s still there, we’ll bury it in the garden somewhere,
and no, I don’t know why it hurled itself at our house.
We plan the little bird’s potential funeral until she drifts off to sleep
and I go out with a flashlight and a handful of paper towels
go back out to the yard, pick up the little bird and hide it
plan to tell my daughter how it must’ve woken up, flew away,
everything’s fine.
Holly Day has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review, and her newest full-length poetry collections are Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), and Book of Beasts (Weasel Press).