Is the robin resting, dear Night?
Or is this hole I’ve fashioned into a home
the source of a nest upturned?

To think the cause of this silence
yearned for what my leafless limbs could gather
and this hungry beak could break.
All for the sake of a white-picket birchbox
muted by the steel
I call my feeling.

Isn’t it interesting dear Night?
That Ida’s feathers are an itch in my ear?
As I tell myself I’m happy
and with clipped wings
am free.

How I mutter,
“This cubicle is not a cage”
and “These paychecks aren’t pellets.”

Ida nods
how this cubicle is not a cage
and my paychecks aren’t pellets.
And that like the trees,
we’re happy here
and with supplanted beams, are upheld like the inner arches we burn.

Dear Night,
Perhaps it’s not the robin’s song that’s been muted,
but us, in the pursuit of the rest we came to call a home upturned.

-Amy Struthers

Image by Eric Ward