The Angels

Michael Hettich

As the day turned to dusk, we sensed we could feel
the people we’d loved and lost calling
like a breeze that suggests itself but never
actually awakens the trees. She told me
again about the moment she decided to let
our first child go so she could go on
living herself, and I remembered
how once, as a young man, I’d walked by myself
for a day, until I was lost and came
to a boulder and a creek. She remembered yearning
to comfort our baby after we’d scattered
her ashes, and I remembered that the sun
had been warm; the sound of the creek had filled me
with something as different from thought or song
as a dream. She said she still dreamed of Audrey,
our lost child. And then I told her again
that when dusk fell, a clutch of black birds landed.
Even when I stood up and gestured, there
in that unfamiliar landscape, they refused to fly away.
I think they were hungry. But I had nowhere else to go,
so I lay down under stars so sharp
in that darkness they hurt my eyes, even
when my eyes were closed. All night those black birds
stood watching, waiting for something. Like angels,
she said then and laughed, though I don’t think she was joking.

Copyright © 2025 by Michael Hettich. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 3, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

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about this poem

“Though the death of our first child at birth occurred over forty years ago, the pain of that tragedy is still almost impossible to write about, partly because the loss, though shared, impacted my wife’s soul and body much more deeply than it did mine. Our shared grief, different as it was, challenged and ultimately deepened our love. It has continued to do so as we face new and equally difficult challenges today. While ‘The Angels,’ attempts to grapple with these challenges, it also strives to articulate a glimmer of redemptive mystery through the sudden evocation of those shared angels.”
—Michael Hettich

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