The fall of the sparrow

A poem of grief

The Fall of the Sparrow

“If you’re going to care about the fall of the sparrow you can’t pick and choose who is going to be the sparrow. It’s everybody and you’re stuck with it.”
~Madeleine L’Engle

You thought about yourself first, didn’t you?
Where the bombs might fall and
how long it would take you to escape—
route 90 out of Boston packed with
other refugees.

It’s okay. You’re human.
It’s a natural response to flee from danger.

Then you thought about your family—
would they be okay, could you meet them somewhere?

Don’t be ashamed of this.
Shame is such an unhelpful feeling, anyway.

But don’t stop there. Don’t stop caring
when you reach the end of your relations
and of people who look like you,
speak the same language in the same accent.

Keep going. Because the Iranians are people, too.
The Israelis, Palestinians, they, too, are imagining routes
out of danger. But they are taking them.
Packing. Fleeing. Or unable to flee.

Jesus said not a single sparrow would fall to the ground
without God knowing and caring.

My friends, today, the sparrows are falling.

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