Sanctuary

Sanctuary

They sit on a stone bench in the sanctuary
pressed against the highway’s edge—
listening to bird songs intertwine overhead
in this cage of golden mesh,
five blocks long and ten stories high.

One is blind, the other legless.

The blind one, wearing his old army jacket—
the replacement for the one torn to shreds in the flash—
tilts his head to the chaos of warbles.
After three weeks of just listening, he can now make out
not only individual bird calls, but he can feel the whole symphony—
the divas, the chorus, and even the instrumentalists.

“Red-eyed vireo,” he says,
as a thin song threads through the mesh.
The sighted one, his prosthetics polished to a dull shine,
scans the branches.
“Olive back. White belly.
Resembles a priest’s collar.”
The blind man nods.
“Listen,” he says, “it’s asking for forgiveness
for something it didn’t do.”

Almost…that voice from Iraq—
the baby-faced private with a radio pressed to his chest
saying something about coordinates
before the sky folded in—
a spectral presence,
not fully embodied but deeply etched—
not a character—
a shard of memory,
a witness caught mid-transmission.
His voice is…
They can never remember him.
The flash made that impossible.

The mesh hums faintly in the wind—
a veil between memory and now.
It catches feathers, leaves,
and sometimes the echo of a……

A black-and-white warbler flits past.
The blind man stiffens.
Its cawing—
the radio chatter before the convoy hit the ridge.
The legless man doesn’t answer.
He watches the bird disappear
into the lattice of gold and shadow.

Outside, cars tear past—
Dodge Rams, souped-up pickups,
eighteen-wheelers dragging the country’s insides
from one coast to the other—
engines coughing, trying to breathe through dust.

The sighted man listens.
“Sounds like a Dodge,” he says.
“Lifted. Angry. Tired.”
The blind man hears only the smear,
the low gray scream of combustion.
A Mack Truck roars by.
“Dark,” he says. “With a voice I want to forget.”

A raven lands on the mesh above them.
“Black. Smells of burnt oil,” says the sighted man.
“Voice— a rusted hinge?”
the blind man says, then smiles.
“Crow. That one’s easy.”

Inside the aviary,
a hanging plant brushes the blind man’s face—
almost the soft end of a dream.
Outside— the highway screams.
Another eighteen-wheeler howls—
dragging what?— he wonders—

Mascara?
Boots?
Fuel?
Corn?
Water?

Grief?

They sit in the slow of the sanctuary—
Silence there, mercy—

The traffic never stops asking—

What they left behind.