This bird, of course, isn't a robin; but it's the only one I could photograph today when I needed a real, living bird to go with the dove on the cross in the photograph I took this morning after Palm Sunday services in the chancel.A MEMORY (draft)

I remember it was the same year the war ended
that I killed the bird, the year my Mother sent me
with my cousin to ring the church bell, the year I was
ten and old enough to know what war was and to
see the relief in my Mother’s face that the war ended
and her brothers were still alive... it was that year
that I killed the bird, the year she sent my cousin
and me to ring the church bell because the war
was over and killing had stopped... it was in
that same long year that I killed the bird... and
when she said go ring the church bell we asked
how long we should ring it and she said for as
long as you are able... it was in that year that
I killed the bird... so we pulled the rope all day
it seemed to me until we couldn’t pull any more.
I was ten and old enough to know a robin from
a mockingbird. I was over by the railroad tracks
by the fence in front of the meadow with butter-
cups... I could see why they were cups but not
the butter, and wild roses and the fence had
posts just right for setting up soup cans to be
targets when I was ten that year the war ended,
old enough to have climbed the big oak tree
in our yard to see the robin’s eggs, old enough
to know not to touch them or the mother bird
would come back to the nest and know I
had been there and had touched them but
I didn’t, couldn’t even though I wanted to...
Old enough to turn away and leave the eggs
or they would never feel again the warmth of
her soft body, old enough to have my father
begin to think there were things he should do
to turn me, his oldest son, from boy to man,
old enough, he said, for me to have the gun
I wanted, the B-B-GUN with Red Ryder’s name
on it, that I knew he thought was just a toy
but dangerous enough to put out somebody’s eye,
he said, absolutely under no circumstances
to aim it in the direction of anybody. It was the
year when I was ten and knew enough about
life to know it ended at least for people like Granddad
who had died one summer evening after milking time
and was already in the long hearse when we got there
to the house with the porch all around it, the house
I loved to go to because he had always been in it.
I was ten so I knew how unfair it was for him to die,
to be taken away from my Grandmother and from me
and especially from my Mother and I though she
would never be able to go on the way she had laughed
and been happy on my birthday and had laughed
and cried all at once on the day she said to ring the bells.
I was ten that year when I went off over by the tracks
and set up my cans on five posts, I can see them now
in the bright sunlight, and I shot at them and hit them
some of the time but mostly missed them altogether...
The day was perfect. The war was over. I was ten.
The meadow was yellow and green. The sky was blue
as it always was when I was ten. The creek was clear.
I was ten then and old enough to know the color
of robin’s eggs and to know what life was even
if I didn’t know what death was or what it meant.
I looked up from shooting soup cans and saw
the bird against the sky, sky with no storm in it,
the bird wasn’t singing, wasn’t doing anything but
breathing I guess and enjoying the day and being.

What kind of bird it was doesn’t matter.
I killed it, silenced its song, stopped its flying.
My father, the man who loved me and wanted me
to be a real man when I grew up, gave to me
the Red Ryder gun and the smooth cylinder
of small pellets, seeming harmless, lovely really,
the tiny, shiny balls of death dropped into the
chamber waiting to be released, directed, aimed
by me at something that had no connection to me
except to be on earth at the same time I was on it.

I pulled the gun up from shooting cans and aimed
and pressed my finger on the trigger at the sky
where the bird was waiting for me to end its life
and it fell straight down to the earth and I stooped
and felt raw regret rise, rise in my throat when
I was ten years old and knew what color a robin’s
breast is before blood makes it even redder.
I never told my father why I couldn’t go hunting
with him, he never asked, he must have known
something had happened because the gun
stayed in the tool shed until it rusted... I found
it there when I was more than twenty and
I wish now, looking back, that I had told him
how I felt, the sadness and regret, when I had
picked up the little handfull of still-warm feathers,
bloody from the single wound I had made in the
red breast of the creature that wanted only to sing
and fly and lay blue eggs and live and live and

I was ten that year and the war was over...
Hitler was dead. I wonder now if he could
have done what he did if he had killed
a robin when he was a boy and had seen
warm blood and felt soft wet feathers.