A Bird's Nest Made of White Reed Fibers

By Robert Bly

The nest is white as the foam thrown up when the sea hits rocks. It is translucent like those cloudy transoms above Victorian doors. It is swirled like the hair of those intense nurses, gray and tangled after long nights in the Crimean wards. This wren's nest is something made and then forgotten, like our own life that we will entirely forget in the grave when we are about to be pushed up on shore like some stone, ecstatic and black.