Sanctuary by Dorothy Nielsen I like to keep this bird magnet near – the one I didn’t remember to send to my mother before dementia, the nursing home, and then a quiet dying interrupted long years in her own kitchen watching for the cardinal that this magnet recalls each time I pull my fridge door open. I would think of my fridge magnet when, one spring, I’d open your Zoom link to a Covid-era funeral. Near my study window, my own resident cardinal was pouring out a heart-rending song for your mother while miles away, watched by twittering birds it seems you’d interrupted among the trees, you gently laid her in her final home. My screen-gallery showed other mourners whose second home, like mine, was once your mother’s kitchen – always open, as my mom’s was, to our friends who so often interrupted their quiet, ousting them, though still we sensed them near- by playing their patient role of brooding mother, which only decades later I realized had been a cardinal rule of theirs. Now you tell me your mom loved it when a cardinal caroled from the elms behind your home. Studying my bird magnet today, I picture each mother listening from her kitchen, window open, watching for a flash of red as four o’clock draws near, the hour her private dreams are interrupted. When at last I was a parent, I saw how daydreams could be interrupted by another soul. And suddenly my first cardinal appeared with his seeming frenzy to come so near that he’d launch himself against the window, as if drawn to this home I was finally making. To stop him, I’d have to wind the window open wide on those long days of learning the secrets held by a mother, such as, first: that something about being “mother” might have settled the self, yet at the same time interrupted those enclosed visions girls will spin, eyes half-shut, half-open during dreamy years before they fly like a reckless cardinal at reflections of themselves in the windows of somebody’s home, crashing into a future they’d never dreamt was so near. Or, second: once a new life has erupted to pry our hearts open, we will need a resident cardinal for the home, hovering near, to sing a sanctuary for the mother.
Dorothy Nielsen’s essays, fiction, and poems appear in many books and journals, including The Literary Review of Canada, Contemporary Literature, Canadian Poetry, Christianity and Literature, The Fiddlehead, and Traces Journal. She writes in a variety of free verse and traditional forms; most recently, her alliterative verse poem about the presentation of Christ in the temple was published by Forgotten Ground Regained. Dorothy serves on the advisory board for Traces Journal.
