angelbirdflies

My dad sat quietly on a chipped azure bench, blue eyes watching the tide like an old friend.  Weathered hands tugged at the corners of a thread-worn, teal blanket wrapped securely around shoulders, once broad and strong, now narrowed and bent. White hair and a wayward beard blew like sea foam across his face, assaulting eyes with sand, salt and curls.  My dad didn’t use to lounge on the park benches of tourist traveled beaches.  No.  He preferred unguarded waters and abandoned stretches of sand on which to rest his chronically tan and muscular body. At ninety, his feet no longer walked with their former ease on the unsteady shoreline, so he sat instead, listening to a distant surf with face tilted to the sun. I perched on the sand at his feet, grateful for a few hours together.  Dad opened his eyes when a pigeon landed nearby with a flutter of wings and a soft, “pruuuu, prrruuu.”  Dad watched the bird pecking at the sand.  Soon more pigeons arrived and their chorus of “pruuuu, pruuuu,

Nothing wants to suffer. Not the wind  as it scrapes itself against the cliff. Not the cliff being eaten, slowly, by the sea. The earth does not want to suffer the rough tread of those who do not notice it. The trees do not want to suffer the axe, nor see  their sisters felled by root rot, mildew, rust.   The coyote in its den. The puma stalking its prey.  These, too, want ease and a tender animal in the mouth  to take their hunger. An offering, one hopes,   made quickly, and without much suffering.  The chair mourns an angry sitter. The lamp, a scalded moth.  A table, the weight of years of argument.  We know this, though we forget.  Not the shark nor the tiger, fanged as they are.  Nor the worm, content in its windowless world  of soil and stone. Not the stone, resting in its riverbed.  The riverbed, gazing up at the stars.  Least of all, the stars, ensconced in their canopy,  looking down at all of us— their offspring—  scattered so far beyond reach. - by Danusha Laméris