Feast

The Cardinal

Maybe it’s the cold, the heavy
woolish snow blanket—more this month
than in whole years
of hibernal quietude.

Maybe it’s the paucity of visitors
to our weathered deck.

Few flighted ones
attempt to find the seed I scattered,
hidden now. Surely no opossum
will trundle up stairs coated in three feet
of frozen cover
that looks like cotton,
shovels like concrete.

Maybe it doesn’t matter how it came—
the utter shock of delight

at the sight of him,
bloody scarlet against the unrelenting white,
his hollow-boned body
hopping easily over mounds that cover
table, chairs, feeders.

The shiver! It ran
like a splinter
through my arthritic hands,
pushing pen towards page
in an almost violent move,

as if force and reverence somehow made love
to create this moment.

He arrived. He was briefly here.
I can’t prove it
but he came, you see,
bearing provisions,

and I was hungry,
starving beneath the layer of fat
my belly has lately grown

and I ate the sight of him,
bouncing little shape
of beak and eye
nestled well into glorious crimson.

Don’t try to tell a poet
it doesn’t happen—
this feast on hope—
that a person cannot masticate,
swallow, digest
and be nourished by
the trembling joy
of a red bird on white, white snow.

–Melinda Coppola

Photo by Patrice Bouchard on Unsplash