The Nest in Winter by Kimiko Hahn
There’s nothing to toss among the vivid tethers to Mother.
The Nest in Winter
by Kimiko Hahn
In the father’s shadowy hoard pillows belch feathers across mattress and floors: what was an oriental rug, now a carpet of scat, gone-astray socks, calendars from rescue shelters angling for checks. There’s nothing to toss among the vivid tethers to Mother. Maybe my mother, maybe Father’s. There’s no margarine container any less pathetic than a netsuke from Kyoto; no expired sardine tin less urgent than a dozen aerograms; no receipt less intimate than their honeymoon photo snapped in the local aquarium. The adult daughter takes in the spew, pabulum that a bird feeds its nestling.
First published in ONLY POEMS (January 2025)
The poem feels like a daughter stepping into a room where grief and love have settled into every corner.
Each scattered object becomes a small pulse of memory, refusing to be dismissed as mere clutter.
The feathers, tins, socks, calendars all of it feels like the residue of two lives that never fully let go of each other.
There’s a tenderness in the way she cannot separate what belonged to whom, as if their histories had fused in the dust.
The contrast between the trivial and the precious shows how, in a hoard, everything becomes equally sacred, equally wounded.
The honeymoon photo buried in debris lands like a quiet heartbreak, a reminder of a tenderness now swallowed by time.
The daughter’s gaze carries both overwhelm and love, as if she is inheriting emotions she never asked to hold.
The room becomes a kind of nest built from scraps chaotic, intimate, strangely protective.
The comparison to a bird feeding its young turns the mess into something painfully nurturing, a love expressed through remnants.
In the end, the poem becomes a meditation on how the traces we leave behind can still cradle those who come after us.
The magic of poetry creates a new slant on hoarding in the most compelling way.