Aubade: Amman

Wasps lap the olive pits as light into the small yard enters

  the tree—the half-bloomed branches of tree—

      delivering the sunbird

delivering light’s dull splinter: that stick

    insect unclasped from above the nest of paper and cloth, then dropped

    in an open beak. Safe

in his crib, our son has not yet woken. I hear the bird

    outside: I know her   pearl-gray belly; the metallic green

alighting her mate’s rough throat. She sounds

distressed. Waiting for someone   to call my name, I have no words for

what I feel—a flash

      and my child will stand

full-grown before me, and the man I’ve loved so long will be

    breathless. I still myself;   I listen—think of the sunbird carving, above wooded Ajloun,

night’s wintry air, gliding her   back to our small yard, back to the olive tree

she resettles each spring, as if to attest—with orange     scraps of song—that

silence is counterfeit,     that light will return   and rise, sloughing its previous form for the next.