Pruning Burning Bushes. Sarah M. Wells

is no el train in Auburn, no steady rumble

      like thunder on a summer afternoon. Suburbans

      honk and veer behind my neighbor’s combine,

      pass, speed up to the light, line up at four-ways

      for permission to turn. The Cleveland and Eastern

      Interurban used to pass through here,

      the Maple Leaf Route curved slow through Newbury

      to Amish country, carrying produce and passengers

      in to the big city to see a show at the Hippodrome.

      Today, the maples shiver along the upraised curve

      as if a train has just passed through, but it is only me

      or the wind. I do not hear the click-clack on the raised track,

      the crowd of travelers standing in the woods waiting

      for the junction’s switch to take them north or further west.

      Now the forest and road are silent; last season’s leaves

      crunch beneath my feet. Syrup drips from its spile

      into cold, steel buckets. A car swings south down

      Munn Road, wondering at the slope in the woods

      and then the thought is gone. The sun rolls steady on its track

      across the blue, though I’m the one who’s moving—I

      and the farmer and the Suburban and the earth composting

      beneath my feet, faster than these fleeting minutes.

      How slow the shift in shadows. How soon

      I’m surprised to be chilled in the late afternoon.

      Consider the Sparrows

      “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?

      Yet not one of them will fall to the ground

      apart from your Father.”

       —Matthew 10:29

      So many come, Dad hides behind a blind

      with birdshot and a rifle in the grain field.

      They scatter, land, scatter, land. I hear them

      chirping through the boom, watch their flight

      ripple like cotton sheets lifted in the wind.

      A sparrow’s egg on concrete—the yolk

      seeping through the fracture—makes me stop

      to look from broken shell to fretting maple

      branches above, for the mother who chirrups

      in her nest, twitching, head tilted, eyes blinking.

      Small sparrow, tomorrow I will walk

      beneath your bed just like today,

      the ruined egg in smaller fragments, or vanished,

      and you will scavenge the earth, fly overhead,

      the sky heavy with you and your flock