dead bird

What a sad little thing you are, your wings clipped with ice and your legs sticking straight up and towards the sky. Your unmoving eyes are frozen shut, cold and unseeing in the swirl of the snowy winter air.

What a pathetic, hopeless sight you make. A tiny little creature, plump bellied and stiff legged, exposed and prone. You rest there on your final perch, flipped over on your back, mute and deaf.

It is a sad thing to see how dejected a creature looks when it has frozen to death.

Looking at you, I can see first hand how cruel winter really is, how difficult it is to manage the long and merciless nights. How hard it is to make ends meet, to find a warm place to nest for the coldest hours. And God knows, that in this weather, these past few evenings of temperatures in the range of ten below zero, staying alive is not an adequate word. 'Survival' is.

Survival. What a wretched word, but a glorious one, too. The difficulties, the pain and the suffering, the amazing highs and the bitter lows; this is to survive and be an adult.

It's a human problem, shrunk down and molded to the animal condition. Encapsulated in the form of a tiny finch, a sad, pathetic, and very dead little bird.

You, little creature, are my frozen metaphor for the harsh realities of winter.