Bonhoeffer, Tegel Prison

by Betsy Sholl

“Tomtits” he called them, the fledglings
he watched each day in the prison yard.

back when the Nazis had little on him
besides preaching a Gospel of brotherhood
and a few suspect runs to London.

“Tomtits,” a catch-all name for those small
songbirds that build nests in abandoned places—

woodpecker holes, old tree stumps,
or a prison wall where a brick’s fallen out,
nests woven out of twigs and hair—this one

filled with ten eggs, then ten squalling chicks,
two parents flying in with insects and seeds.

“A salve to the soulless life of prison,”
he wrote, even as he also wondered
if calling nature a salve was too easy.

This was before the assassination plot
failed, and connections were revealed,

before he found the nest one morning
torn from its hole. “Some cruel fellow”
he wrote, “went and destroyed the lot,

left the tomtits lying on the ground, dead.”
Later, with the scaffold almost certain,

his own life already torn and wrenched,
somehow, he saw past that old prison wall,
past the broken place, into an opening.