More like a basket
of twig and hair,
surprisingly
tall
and deep—
in a tree
outside my bedroom
window.
I knew
something lived in there
you wouldn’t assume
lived in a nest.
Then I knew:
a human lived there.
And once I knew—
the nest, nearly
disintegrated,
still in the tree.
It wasn’t about trauma, the perfect
and then the broken
nest
in which a human
lived—
Born and lit and broken
comes I.
Copyright © 2023 by Dana Levin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 6, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.