red-breasted robins

red-breasted robins

in the top of a dead tree,

gray clouds moving fast

As a young child, the red-breasted Robin was one of the first birds I learned to recognize, both by its reddish-orange breast and by its cheerily song. Often when I played outside in the yard, I would watch a Robin hop across the grass, stop and turn one bright black eye to peer at the ground, then bob its head to spear a worm and brace its yellow legs to pull it out. Sometimes I would find a blue egg broken on the ground, the yellow yolk spilling out. I would add the fragile shell to my collection of beautiful found objects. One time, I found a Robin's nest hidden in a low bush, made of sticks stuck together with mud and lined with grass. This, too, I added to my collection. When I was two years old, I cut a hank of my hair from the top of my head and used it to fashion a nest, which I carefully placed in a bush, hoping a Robin would find it and lay her blue eggs in it. This was right before Easter and my mother had a hard fit when she saw my mangled hair. She demanded to know why I had done such a thing. When I said "bird nest," she thought I meant that I had tried to make my hair look like a bird's nest. To her that was something messy and ugly, but to me a nest was a thing of great beauty. This spring I found a Robin's egg on the ground, completely whole. I brought it home and placed it in a Robin's nest that resides on a shelf in my studio. Today, out for a walk, I see one Robin in the top of a dead tree, then another joins it and another. I stop and watch, wondering what they are looking for so high up, perhaps berries or caterpillars. Something alarms them, maybe my presence, and one of them utters PEEEK tut tut tut tut! Two of them fly away, but the first one, highest in the dead tree, remains unperturbed, even after I continue my walk.