by
Walter Bargen
They are alert to
danger, life and death a kind of score
simply kept by their
beaked heads bobbing up and down
among the scattered
seeds. They are on the small concrete
basketball court
beside the house-its symmetry at odds
with the a field
crowded with the burnished stalks of broomsedge
and the shrinking
geography of crusted snow.
Sparrows randomly
rearrange themselves, unless hunger
is ordered, flying
back and forth between barbed wire
fencing and buck
brush. Back after a night of subzero
temperatures, there
is a desperation in their searching,
eyeing the crouched
housecat, as if it were nothing more
than a misplaced
shadow shaken loose from its light,
the hungry welcoming
winter's early end.
Much as the cargo
planes that left the secret airfields
of Buenos Aires,
decades ago, during the "Dirty War,"
that leveled off far
out and high over the windswept Atlantic,
and there, which is
nowhere that is known or can be found
again, students and
union activists, teachers and artists,
were shoved through
open doors, the whole world
their flyway as they
flew into the face of their beliefs,
what they'd held
onto in cold cells, strapped to tables and chairs,
against cigarette
burns and electric shock, and questions
never meant to
answered. It surprised them as they
spiraled
down that no matter
how far their arms and legs spread
they could not perch
on the air, and before they could consider
other possibilities,
they plunged through their wet shadows.
It was Charles
Lindbergh, the first pilot to fly solo across
the Atlantic, his
plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, hangs from
the ceiling of
Lambert Field Terminal, its glistening body
catching the
thousand eyes of travelers rushing to the next
flight-his son also
disappeared, kidnapped and killed-
he said, ". . .
if I had to choose, I would rather have birds
than
airplanes," and today mothers, thousands of miles away
and years later,
hold up placards and wear pictures
of their sons and
daughters hanging from their wrinkled
necks, the glossy
photos shining in the sunlight, all they have
left as they gather
each week without fail, though some have
already grown too
old to ever return to the Plaza de Mayo
in Buenos Aires
they too agree about birds, about sparrows.
Sparrow first
appeared in Icarus Anthology.