Evening
by Gail Mazur
Sometimes she’s Confucian—
resolute in privation. . . .
Each day, more immobile,
hip not mending, legs swollen;
still she carries her grief
with a hard steadiness.
Twelve years uncompanioned,
there’s no point longing for
what can’t return. This morning,
she tells me, she found a robin
hunched in the damp dirt
by the blossoming white azalea.
Still there at noon—
she went out in the yard
with her 4-pronged metal cane—
it appeared to be dying.
Tonight, when she looked again,
the bird had disappeared and
in its place, under the bush,
was a tiny egg—
“Beautiful robin’s-egg blue”—
she carried carefully indoors.
“Are you keeping it warm?”
I ask—what am I thinking?—
And she: “Gail, I don’t want
a bird. I want a blue egg.”
Copyright © by Gail Mazur. This poem is from They Can’t Take That Away From Me, University of Chicago Press, 2001. Reprinted with permission.