Augury

Mo(u)rning Doves

Blue rings

Round dark eyes

With spotted wings.

Beautiful bird,

Symbol of innocence,

Free like the so(u)l

That burns inside me.

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Yet the poor girl

Does not know

The difference

Between a window

And the sky…

So I gently trap

Her feathered wings

Between steady hands

And show her the way.

***** * *****

Rommentary:

One day I left the windows down on the truck at work. I came back out to find a couple of mourning doves camping on the dashboard. When I opened the driver’s side door, the bigger of the two flew out the other open window, but the smaller one kept frantically trying to fly up to the sky through the windshield.

I kept both doors open and shooed her in the right direction, but she just kept digging herself farther into one corner of the dash, pushing against what to her might have seemed a forcefield. I let her calm down and gently cupped my hands over her wings, brought her out, and let her go, where she flew to the open air.

What if those things which most beleaguer us are just such mistakes of perception? When we are depressed, for instance, and feel trapped in a state of torpidity, is it perhaps that we trapped ourselves mentally? Have we exhausted ourselves from trying to fly through an unopen window when an open window was nearby the whole time?

Later I saw the dove couple perched together again on the hood of the truck, but I rolled up the windows to leave only a crack too small for them to enter, lest they were again tempted to trap themselves, and I wondered if perhaps someone or something had done the same for me.