Praise Song for the Killdeer on the School Softball Field

We were reading Hopkins, and my students were puzzled. How could the world be bent? What did it mean that the Holy Ghost is brooding over the bent world?

“Can you think of any words that mean the same as ‘bent’?” I asked.

“How is the Holy Ghost often portrayed in art?” I asked.

But these were city kids in a secular school. They had never heard of a brooding bird or seen a hen settle on a clutch of eggs. They had not been taught by nuns that in scripture the Holy Spirit sometimes appears as a dove. I demonstrated the way a bird can sit on fragile eggs without breaking them: the careful adjustment of world-shaped eggs, the embrace of sheltering wings.

“Oh, like that bird on the softball field,” one student said, and so we had to go outside and see.

The student led us straight to a killdeer nesting on the ground, her speckled eggs nearly invisible in the outfield. The bird stood up in alarm as we approached, but when she saw that we would come no closer she settled again, exactly as Hopkins writes: “with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”