Walking the Wall

by Ursula Le Guin

Is it appropriate that a woman mourn a bird?

A fledgling acorn woodpecker, in
a hole in the old elm over the picnic table:
all week we watched the adults come and feed it.
Heard it fizzing and wheedling, learning to purr,
louder every day. Took a picture
of the small, alert, black-white-and-red
head looking out. Yelled and threw stones
at the Steller’s jay that came to kill it shrieking.
Winged the jay, but didn’t save the fledgling.
So that’s the story.

The parents, relatives,
the little tribe that had looked after it,
never came back to the elm. They stayed
up in the oaks, up on the knoll, flashes
of black-white-red, the dipping flight,
calling and purring, many conversations.
Birds don’t mourn.

How can a human being
cry for a bird in a world where children
suffer in terror? Species die daily.
Men bomb undefended cities.
Torture. Prison camps. Dead forests.
A world of enormous sorrows.
It is out of all proportion.

I mourn
in my proportion, for one death, not wrong,
not out of nature, a life-sized death.
My grief, sharp as a knife the first night
is dull, small, long. Aching for words.

So I name this death, as birds do not,
and women do, appropriate it,
make it my own: the little one that had
no chance to fly.