Sparrow in the Mead Hall

Reading Craig Arnold’s catalogue

Of lines about sparrows, published

Shortly after he disappeared

While researching a book he planned

On the volcanoes of Japan,

Lost hiking on the island of

Kuchinoerabujima,

Never to write a poem again,

Makes you think about his ending

Allusion to Venerable

Bede’s parable of the sparrow

Who flies through the Saxon king’s hall.

Human life is that sparrow’s flight

From winter’s window into warmth

Across the happy hall and out

The other window into snow,

In Bede’s story, knowing nothing

About the before or after,

Or, as Arnold asks the sparrow

In his poem before dying young—

Sparrow do you imagine more than a little warm

rambunctious life between two corridors of nothing

the one forever before     the one forever after

Supposedly, this suggestion

Was enough to convert the king

To Christianity, never

Mind that the sparrow’s main business

Of life was with winter, before

And after that king’s hall fly-through,

Maybe scary for the sparrow,

Maybe a daring raid for food,

The harrowing of the mead hall,

As the story’s told by sparrows.

This reminds you how what’s special

About you among the living

Is the one thing that haunts you most—

Even once it dies in the snow

And ends as a bird, the sparrow,

The material sparrow, turns

Into new material things

Including many other lives,

And it held many lives in it

While it was living, which turn

Also into more lives and things.

The king, and Bede, and the poet

Are the only flickering things

That think themselves, through words, as things,

And they’re therefore the only things,

As meanings, that come from nothing

And return to nothing, which is

Special, but it haunts them. You, too.