Quiet Noise
Barbara Brooks

I’s the weekend, I spend an hour
watching the bald eagle’s nest.
Cricket frogs click in the reeds,
as a wood duck slips through.
On an invisible thread, an inchworm
shimmies up to the limb.

The eagle flies in from the south,
I can’t hear the wind in its wings
nor the eaglets’ begging cries.
The mother tears at the fish,
feeds one and then the other,
moves to the pine’s roost branch,
shakes her feathers.

From the south,
the male flies
to the nest,
a fish in its talons.

I have spent the past
four days among the alarms
of the hospital.  The pager screams
for attention, and, if you forget,
beeps subtle reminders.
The yellow tracing of the heart
goes straight.  The slowing inhale
and exhale of the ventilator
sighs into silence.

Barbara Brooks, author of the chapbook The Catbird Sang, studies with Cathy Smith Bowers and works with a writing group in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is a physical therapist at UNC Hospitals and lives in Hillsborough,
North Carolina.

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