It’s the penultimate Thursday in this March. The temperature will drop before sunset. Yet, the sun, we believe, still peeks behind unsettled patchworks of gray sky shadows. My chilled bones stubborn, refuse to warm.
I’ve sprinkled some sunflower seeds on the flat rock settled in the front flower bed close to the feeder for the forgotten finches and sparrows—just to will goodness by actualizing one, small, constructive act.
I’m rewarded by a tiny, tawny and tortilla hued house sparrow who visits, tilting her head, wondering. With apparent kindness, she appreciates this human attention. We are mutually aware.
She rests in my gaze and I in hers. My smile broadens and her stillness fills the unpredictable March air.
This moment of peace transcends the familiar calls for more weapons, more destruction, more killing and desecration of any standing blade of grass.
TV networks, unorthodox or traditional, clash among themselves with their repetitive stories, words, imagery to target viewership numbers and profit margins, excite, incite or desensitize.
Audiences gather, as in times of Caesar, for their daily dose of panem et circensem while neighbors and strangers alike struggle to survive in an ominous web of uncertainty, alienation, and an apparent implant of the business-as-usual mantra, despite everything contrary.
Camps of the illegally blind have been forged, caught between lost myopic visions from East to West, wrapping themselves in feigned valor, warped, clinging unsteady, by stars and stripes.
My breath returns to the dusk air, in little puffs of white steam as the sparrow turns, her beak clinging to a sunflower seed in her blessed flight, as a glow of warmth grows through my bones.
