‘I see you in my sleep / Awake, you are an absence I endure’: A poem for vanishing sparrows

Note to a Sparrow

In childhood, chasing chidiyas round a room
was sport. Exhausted, you would fall and flutter.
I’d switch the fan off first to ward off doom;
I was a wanton boy… not a nutter.
We didn’t have a proper word for sparrow,
You were generic birds who lived at home,
Like dogs and sibs, but not as pets or kin,
Free to flit past Amma’s straight-and-narrow,
To feed and nest and roam,
To fly, while grounded mammals mooched within.

I haven’t raced you now in sixty years,
My children have no memories of you,
In times deranged by grand extinction fears
I wonder what the two of you will do.
I see your painted head and inky bib,
The twitchy way you tilt your head and cheep,
I see her face, pale eyebrowed and demure,
Your wife for life, this hot and flighty rib.
I see you in my sleep;
Awake, you are an absence I endure.

An absent sparrow is an awful thing,
An order of the ordinary gone,
The nightingale forgetting how to sing
Is not the same, the world will carry on.
I want you back inside my balcony
Astir within your made-to-measure nest,
Intent on kissing up a brood of you.
I’ll find an icon of Saint Anthony
To guard your sated rest,
You’ll be a sign the world is back in true.

Or not. Two fostered sparrows won’t repair
A broken world or douse the hidden fire
That fogs your balcony with charry air
And folds the earth into a poisoned gyre.
And yet, to share a common wall with you
To live adjacently will be a prize,
Because you’ll be this house’s soul, its numen.
I see you whir and light upon my shoe
Look up and meet my eyes,
And clock the mad conceit of being human.