who will love the little sparrow...will no one write her eulogy?

The common sparrow

I give thanks for this cheerful bird

ordinary and messy in its nest building

but a tenacious caretaker of its young

And it is nests in my birdhouses

I love to pass by the nursery and hear the peeps

calling for mom or dad

...hungry mouths sometimes reaching their soft yellow beaks out

of the entry

When I stop and speak to them they pull in and mother usually

sits in a branch, mouth full of small moth...and waits

I speak to her too

Don't worry mom...I'm going..thank for nesting here

in my Open Bar of Joy

Sparrows are the birds I remember while growing up in Chicago

No vast gardens in my neighborhood

but the sparrows were always there for this little girl

sometimes dozens of them perching in a snowball bush

chirping so loudly that my grandfather complained

about the noise and the feather and other stuff mess that they left behind

But I loved their cheeriness

...part of my budding love for birds and all things of nature

And then there was the despised pigeon that roosted on the electric wires

in the alley....I loved their cooing in late afternoon sun

This I had to keep to myself....Grandma hated them

I don't hate anything

I now see these poor birds as the underclass of the bird world

brought here by humans.....trying to survive

yes, they are messy....but that must be their way...encased in their genes

and humans brought them here to this foreign environment

and learned to adapt

humans....always messing with things

I will never forget the time I saw one dead in a parking lot

and its mate kept poking it trying to stir it

it did it for an hour

We are all connected in this universe

surely, we must have empathy and concern for such suffering

even in a lowly bird

So this morning I was glad this sparrow

perched and looked at me and posed

 a prince to me

JOY