In "Wings," Annette Darity Garber Offers a Reminder: Service to One Is Service to All

Editor's note:

Annette Darity Garber's poem explores service offered a baby robin. Writers were asked to respond to the theme of "service" as part of Studio B Art Gallery's "In Service" project.

 Wings
~ Annette Darity Garber

In early May I watched her build
her home of grass and straw
and lay her belly, red and bulging,
down inside its hollow.

Some would judge a mother foolish for building her nest
above a loosening porch light
where three times it would fall from its perch
requiring a stranger with rubber-gloved, awkward hands
to place the featherless bodies back inside
and set the home right again.

Some would say it’s not their concern
when another’s home is destroyed
by a wind
or a warzone
or a weapon.

Many would shake their heads,
call the children unlucky,
and send a thoughtless thought and a prayerless prayer.

Why?

Why lend a hand
or a paper bag
to secure a nest?

Why spread a table beneath it
should the home topple again
to break the soon-to-be-feathered flyers’ fall?

Why set up a home for a family
who speaks
a foreign language?

Why pick up the phone
or a pen
and call for the silencing of weapons taking little ones’ lives?

Why care about the world outside one’s window?

Perhaps the answer lies in the eyes
of the baby robin as she watches you
scoop her body from the cement ground;
in the eyes of her worried, chirping papa
keeping watch from the red bud branch.

Perhaps it’s in the tears that roll from a classmate’s eyes
as he recounts the horror
which now has left him nightmares
…and the empty bed of his cousin.

Perhaps the answer lies behind the eyes—
in the knowing
that another’s pain is my pain
another’s joy or sorrow
also mine.

Perhaps
when the fledgling wings unfurl in flight
                   they also free
                                     my wings to fly.

written on a morning in June, one week after the Uvalde, TX massacre, May 2022

* Annette Darity Garber is a writer, spiritual companion, retreat facilitator and tender of Refugia House. She lives on the original homeland of the Lenni Lenape people in Berks County, Pennsylvania. She is the author of two children's books, Carry and Quite the Same and writes on Substack at Wandering with the Wild Feminine. Annette grew up with a love for Earth, a curiosity about other cultures, and a heart for justice and compassion in our world. These themes infuse her writing and give shape to her being and doing in the world.

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