It was the kind of thing you might step on.
By accident, of course. No bigger than your hand,
and hiding in the willows amongst the river rocks:
A flat plover nest with four speckled eggs.
Oh the mounting relief to have stopped the foot
before it was too late. There are times we wish
we could reverse the clock in the wake of our clumsiness.
But there is no need to go into that. Today, the gift
of four small eggs that still might become four small birds.
You could hold them in your hand, cup them like
the treasure they are. But reverence sometimes
prefers a distance. The mother runs to the river’s edge
where she pretends she is not watching you walk
slowly and empty-handed back the way you came.
So much like the experience of the killdeer eggs I nearly stepped on in the field, the mother raising a ruckus, doing the broken wing dance, trying to let me know I was close to something precious. A good one.