To Save a Sparrow

A Witch’s Prayer for the World

by Natalie Walker

We were walking home. My daughters and I, sweaty from the Texas sun and weighed down with backpacks and stories from the day. And there, on the cracked sidewalk, trembling and too small to fly, was a baby bird.

At first, we didn’t know what to do. Should we leave it? Trust nature to take its course? But nature, these days, is no longer wild or kind—it’s been swallowed by concrete and capitalism, by convenience and cruelty. That bird would die if we didn’t do something.

My daughter ran for some small silicon kitchen tongs to gently lift the bird and we set it into a dried coconut shell that had been cleaned after holding coconut sorbet, and repurposed for small found things that had dubious utility.

So we picked it up. Gently. Tenderly. As if it were sacred. And in that moment, it was. Because something in me cracked open.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it—the fragility of one tiny life, and the desperate ache to protect it. Maybe it’s because I’ve been feeling the weight of all the tiny lives being cast aside, neglected, crushed under the boots of late-stage capitalism and fascist power grabs. Maybe because it feels like every day another law is passed that makes my voice smaller, my vote less meaningful. Maybe because I see trans children—holy, radiant beings—left alone in a world that only knows how to punish difference.

And maybe, if I could save this one small bird, maybe I could balance the scales just a little. Maybe I could forgive myself for all the ways I haven’t been able to save anyone else.

The artist and activist Toni Cade Bambara once said, “It is the artist’s job to make the revolution irresistible.”

And lately, my revolution looks like this:

A sensual, whole, sovereign woman reclaiming her body.

A mother teaching her daughters that love is an act of resistance.

A witch remembering her magic.

A tantra practitioner allowing beauty and truth to seep up from the soil, from the breath, from the body.

Because I remember—deep in my bones—that any woman who tried to protect her children from war was called a witch.

Any woman who owned her sexuality was called a witch.

Any woman who dared to say, “No, I know what’s right for me,” was named witch and cast out.

The ones who healed.

The ones who studied the stars and the roots and the wild edges of the world.

The ones who wouldn’t bow.

The ones like me.

And so when I light my candles and cast spells with my hips and pray with my whole body… when I claim my raw desire and channel my lust for truth into poetry and touch… when I become a living altar to the Divine Feminine in all her erotic, uncontainable power… that is my resistance.

I am not playing by the rules of a system designed to break me.

I am writing new ones, with my hips and my heart and my voice.

And so maybe, just maybe, saving that bird was more than a tender act of care.

Maybe it was a spell.

A tiny act of rebellion.

A whisper to the universe: We are still here. We still love. We still protect what matters.

And the revolution?

She tastes like honey and soil and freedom.

She is irresistible.