I almost cradled you
+++++beneath the stroller wheel:
little bird, a mess of angles
+++++and feathers on sidewalk,
splayed like starlight.
+++++Ants and flies adorn your edges.
Another bird shakes a branch
+++++as it swoops away to explore
dreams that abandoned your wings
+++++in the drop from your nest.
When did your mother expect you
+++++to return home, capable, alive
with knowledge of flight?
+++++My daughter rumbles
against her restraints. She tires
+++++of confinement. I hurry her
past the questions you leave
+++++that I cannot answer. In time,
she, too, will test her flight;
+++++a precipice will beckon,
I might push, she might plummet.
+++++She might cradle wind and soar.
For now, she angles toward me
+++++with an open mouth, hungry
for an embrace I will eventually know
+++++only in memory. And you?
Your mother mourns what eluded
+++++your wings, would have mourned
the forgetting of your songs she dreamed
+++++you would sing if you flew.
Click here to read Quintin Collins on the origin of the poem.
Image: photo by bennett tobias on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.
Quintin Collins:
“One Day, I Will Put My Daughter Down and Never Pick Her Up Again” is a poem from a manuscript in progress that centers on struggles with control and existential dread. The work considers its major threads via discussions of religion, parenting, chronic illness, death, and Blackness in America. For the parenting segment, each poem considers the parent/child relationship as akin to the god/believer relationship. What are the ways in which our concepts of a god deal with the deity’s control over our lives, and how do they interact with our sense of free will and at times the seeming absence of god? How do we (especially those of us with religious upbringing) model this in our parent/child relationships?
In this poem, I considered the questions through the POV of a more benevolent god leaving its believers to their own devices, as well as all the successes and failures that could arise. That inspiration kicked things off but doesn’t directly appear. Instead, I focused on a time when, while walking home with my then 2ish-years-old daughter, I came across a dead baby bird on the sidewalk.
The obvious challenge was including a cliché image. Hatchlings growing up and flying the nest (or not) is familiar. To work against that, I wanted to emphasize the control aspects. We have the speaker who can’t control whether his daughter ultimately flies or plummets the first time. We have the daughter who suffers confinement in a stroller while wanting to move freely. We have the bird whose body couldn’t meet its (or its parent’s) aspirations.
Finally, to manage the sentimentality, the speaker addresses the bird instead of the daughter. That bit of distance made it easier to focus on the message and let the images lead to create the mood.
Quintin Collins (he/him) is a writer, Solstice MFA Program assistant director, and a poetry editor for Salamander. His work appears in various publications, and his first poetry collection is The Dandelion Speaks of Survival. His second collection is Claim Tickets for Stolen People, winner of the Charles B. Wheeler Prize.
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