Kate Hanson Foster
Glimpse
With fearless urgency, the bird
crashed into my bedroom window.
Wings flying toward wings and then breaking
on what must have seemed like another bird
in some peculiar piece of sky.
It landed half-dead on my front porch
like an offering. Little bag of air,
inflating and deflating. Twitching into
or out of every ache. I watched and waited
until it stopped. Rolled the body with a plastic
shovel into my kid’s blue sand bucket.
Carried it to the edge of the yard,
and then tossed it into the woods.
And nothing moved, or flinched, or changed.
Sun boring into every window of the house.
About the writer:
Kate Hanson Foster’s first book of poems, Mid Drift, was published by Loom Press and was a finalist for the Massachusetts Center for the Book Award in 2011. Her work has appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Harpur Palate, Poet Lore, Salamander, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She was recently awarded the NEA Parent Fellowship through the Vermont Studio Center. She lives and writes in Groton, Massachusetts.
Image: The Tree of Crows by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). Oil on canvas. 23.23 × 28.74 inches. 1822. Public domain.
