Anthony Thomas Lombardi | the sparrows, the sparrows

Anthony Thomas Lombardi is the author of Murmurations (YesYes Books, 2025), a Poetry Project 2021-2022 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, and a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, among other accolades. He is the founder and director of Word is Bond, a community-centered benefit reading series partnered with Brooklyn Poets that raises funds for transnational relief efforts and mutual aid organizations; has taught or continues to teach with Borough of Manhattan Community College, Paris College of Art, Brooklyn Poets, Southeast Review, Polyphony Lit’s apprenticeship programming, and community programming throughout New York City; and currently serves as a poetry editor for Sundog Lit. His work has appeared in Best New Poets, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Nashville Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his cat, Dilla.

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July 24, 2024

Anthony Thomas Lombardi

the sparrows, the sparrows

So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. Matthew 10:31 most days, you do what you can: you refill the birdfeeder, buy a tea set for two at a yard sale, spend the better part of daylight fine-tuning invocations for a theophany who could use two palms of warm porcelain, a little color in her cheeks. you are disconsolately beautiful fidgeting in that dress, fumbling in your pocket for what, you don’t know, mauve lipstick maybe that needs rescuing from the washing machine. committed now to this faux pas a penny is your only take, the most maligned of all legal tender. relax. the leaves will just take another minute to steep. attempt a little small talk, the mallards in the wallpaper never tire of prattling on about the rain, or the rain, but watch your back if i should tell you love’s the only thing i’ve ever known. i have a God-sized hole in my heart. still, i’m irrevocably mortal. my reflection remains visible in pawnshop windows where i linger, the more fraught with casualties the better, raise stakes on which limbs the jewelry fled or feeds: broken marriages, desperation, or merely the dead. on the curb a kid in a MADD t-shirt chewing on the wrong end of a cigarette asks me for a light. fellowship is where you find it so i take what i can get. after hours of staring at diamonds i have to squint to scour the rafters, now drawing nightfall & the flickering traffic of fireflies, trying to spot the sparrows — i think they’re sparrows — but i can’t be trusted with much of anything these days — i hope they’re sparrows. i was convinced i caught the killer in pilgrim’s clothing but it was only my priest feeding the ducks, shaking off the cold Atlantic, chirping & quacking i can’t remember a song so frantic such a distance from the chancel. i pay careful attention to each new slant the morning light brings, test my iron will against calls of the lonely chord: a rattle of angels brushing past wind chimes, the porch’s slow creak like a summer drought, a kiln’s crackle fed broken legs from my grandfather’s armchair. it’s been years now whittling what can’t be called a requiem, refuses prayer, even the hawks lose interest & vested time circling for pay dirt, a rabbit, a cicada still buzzing, ancestors murmuring in the vestiges of tea leaves — they’ve all moved on. you, however, in that doorway, still. remarkable how you stand in that doorway the bird that broke the sky, an infestation of sunlight. remarkable. it’s still there, you know, the world — a glut of sparrows below struggling to outstrip sorrow, your shriek sharp with rapture as you reach over the terrace trying to wrap your arms around them the last time i saw you alive.

My mother lost her battle with alcoholism last year two weeks after her sister lost her own battle with alcoholism. These were the two women I grew up with, together in the projects, bound by more than blood — volatile, often violent, somehow sometimes tender, which made the violence all the more violent. The models for future partners, if I am to believe my analyst, which I do. This required a lot of rewiring in adulthood after living through my own abusive relationships. Their deaths had a tectonic shifting impact on me, as you’d imagine. The effect was two-pronged: I fled back to the Catholic church & then to the page, where I am now, & so are you, hello. In the Bible, sparrows represent — or it’s my understanding that they represent—the love God has for all creatures, no matter how seemingly insignificant. This comforted me even as it made me sad. As an alcoholic myself, told by doctors that it was a miracle I was alive, who somehow beat this disease (it bewilders me daily), for today at least, the guilt you’d expect from Catholicism is multiplied tenfold by survivor’s guilt. I was grappling with all of this, not really aware of it until later. In the grand scheme of things — globally, galactically, celestially — my mother’s & my aunt’s lives were what you may call insignificant. Compound that with the amount of people we’ve, as a society, lost to addiction. I, personally, have lost more than I can even keep up with. But knowing God, wherever He is, loves us despite this negligible standing, here & in the hereafter… I still can’t really put it to language. Hence the poem(s). I hadn’t spoken to my mother much in the final years of her life. I wanted to recreate an earlier memory of her as her last memory. I couldn’t do that in life but I could on the page. I would not have been able to arrive at this poem without the 20-30 I wrote about her before it, but isn’t that always the case? Don’t we need every little thing, every allegedly meager little piece, to put the picture together?