Why does the pigeon fly away?
All night she guards her young on the humid Italian window box.
Vigilant as a palace guard for her babies,
Her all, her special ones
Unique in all the world.
Yet at the squeak of a window hinge she flees,
Bolting as no mother does from her children.
Perching wide-eyed on a clay roof ridge
Watching if they are to be spared or taken.
Does she love them less than those who would give their life?
The Mallard, the Spitfire Plover, the Swan with its beautiful long neck—
Odile and Siegfried—willing to drown for their cygnet
That will never survive without them?
Alas, the pigeon mother is one of the Small Creatures;
One of those whose lot it is to lose,
To have the world spin out from underneath,
A witness to all sorrows and no mercy.
Yet though she flees, she watches;
Sitting on that clay roof ridge
She stays to the end,
Watching her babies ripped and torn apart.
She leaves them helpless, alone, but never abandoned.
That is her last act.
To watch, and be rent to pieces with them.
That is the great sacrificial pyre of the the Small Creatures:
To go on.
But if you are quiet and careful,
Open the window gently and see for yourself.
She is there with them tonight.
Her babies, chirping in the window box for her because they are safe.
2AM perhaps, in the fragile hours;
Snuggled over her young,
Hiding them, warming them with her body,
Hoping her whole is enough to be taken first—
To be the Small Creature for their sake
As she lays with them, three made one.
Can this pigeon, this tender, Small Creature love as you and I,
Who love so deeply as to give ourselves away?
Or was she created with less love to give?
A merciful gift from the world to a mother who must fly away
And watch as her children are torn apart?
Or is she blessed above all creatures big and small?
For when she is on the sill,
Quiet in the early hours of the morning,
Feeling her chicks sleeping in perfect happiness with her,
She is given the whole of love at once.
A gift not given by Epimethius to the great creatures.
The last gift to give, but the greatest to receive.
Simplicity of perfect love.
That is the gift given the Small Creatures.
To be forced to fly for perfect love.