The Angels by Michael Hettich As the day turned to dusk, we sensed we could feel the people we’d loved and lost calling like a breeze that suggests itself but never actually awakens the trees. She told me again about the moment she decided to let our first child go so she could go on living herself, and I remembered how once, as a young man, I’d walked by myself for a day, until I was lost and came to a boulder and a creek. She remembered yearning to comfort our baby after we’d scattered her ashes, and I remembered that the sun had been warm; the sound of the creek had filled me with something as different from thought or song as a dream. She said she still dreamed of Audrey, our lost child. And then I told her again that when dusk fell, a clutch of black birds landed. Even when I stood up and gestured, there in that unfamiliar landscape, they refused to fly away. I think they were hungry. But I had nowhere else to go, so I lay down under stars so sharp in that darkness they hurt my eyes, even when my eyes were closed. All night those black birds stood watching, waiting for something. Like angels, she said then and laughed, though I don’t think she was joking.
First published in Poem-a-Day on January 3, 2025