In the story of Bede’s sparrow (found in Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People— 731 C.E.), the human condition is compared to the flight of a sparrow. Just as a sparrow entering from the stormy winter skies flies the length of a warm, lit mead hall and back again into the harshness of the night, “this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.”
What if the unsung were the only song?
Alan Shapiro
Polly wheels her keyboard into the common room in Wild Horse Creek.
Today, it’s Seasonal Favorites and The Great American Songbook.
She’s come to lure bits of memory back, to draw, if she can, a self
from the cells of the past. After a lag, with luck, a few of the residents
seize on a scrap of tune that unearths for a moment, the old days.
I’ll take you home again, Kathleen. Or Someone to watch over me.
It’s hard not to smile at Who knows where or when?
But listen, my mother has begun to sing. She taps a finger
on the armrest of her wheelchair, and I can’t turn to face her,
afraid that whatever past she’s found will break like a wave
and disperse. Remember that one? she asks. Remember, a word
we’re advised not to use in the Alzheimer’s wing. What I remember,
I tell her, is how you would not allow us to sing at the table.
She laughs as the next song starts, a song she knows at once:
The autumn birds drift past my window …
And in this way a song about leaves comes completely apart,
winging off and returning with birds. Since you went away
the days grow long, and soon I’ll hear old winter’s song …
How long her days must feel, so little left of what she loved—
home and family, friends from tennis and birding. I close my eyes
and weary birds drift gently down like feathers to settle on the tiles.
The only one I recognize is Bede’s simple sparrow completing
a lifetime’s pull through the mead hall and out into the cold, bleak skies
of memory’s emptying songbook.
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