“The Nesting Grounds” is the second-place winner in our Rabbit Room Poetry Prism Contest! We’re so grateful to everyone who submitted and shared their work with us. We’ve been publishing the winning posts on Substack; see the first-place winner here.
By Rachel Lynn Aldrich
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And flying to the altar I have found no isolated nest, no lonely perch— but the warm sound of rustling feathers near, a colony of seabirds huddled high upon the rock, above the gray and spray of waves. The fragile eggs hide safe in every craig of weathered face. I know how they must feel, returning home from sea, wings wearied from their wandering; or when, heads tucked against the storm, they wait for dawn. I’ve watched them ride the restless, salted crests together, diving deep below the cold for daily bread. Here, at the ocean’s edge, they keep the yearly, tidal wheel of feast and famine, sun and storm, life and death. They raise their longing keen above the roll of chaos down below. Before returning to their nightly rest, they press as far to sea as wounded wings will go toward the west.
Rachel is a writer and Pacific Northwest expat living in the Midwest with her husband and two children. Her journalism and personal essays have been published in WORLD Magazine, Transpositions, and her church’s blog. Her practice of writing poetry grew out of her church ministry context, and this is the first time it has been publicly published. Maybe she will finally start that Substack now.
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