Dream: The Sparrow

I dreamed that I was watching a sparrow being chased by a hawk. The sparrow tired; the hawk did not; and the distance between them narrowed. The hawk attacked with its beak, and the sparrow fell crippled to the ground. Thereupon, the hawk perched at some distance and seemed content to bide its time, waiting until later to claim its prey. Dozens of other sparrows, fellows of the unfortunate one, settled around it and began pecking unconcernedly through the grass, confident that the hawk would leave them, at least, alone, when the time came for it to finish its work. And so the wounded bird continued to limp among his teeming community, friendless and doomed.

Author: Harry Miller

I have traveled and lived in Taiwan, China, and Japan and am now a professor of Asian history and author of Southern Rain, a novel of seventeenth-century China. View all posts by Harry Miller