A meadowlark feigns a broken wing to lure a watcher away from her eggs, and that small act of protective theater becomes the key to a human confession. Risa Bear’s “Seventy-Eight” is a two-stanza lyric that moves from the natural world to an intimate address. The speaker observes the bird “practicing on me / the ruse of / a broken wing,” then admits, “I have guarded / my wounds from you / twenty years / the same way.” The central idea is not simply that people hide pain, but that they may perform one kind of damage to shield another, using distraction as a form of survival. What appears to be vulnerability can actually be armor.
The construction enacts that shift. The poem is written in free verse with no rhyme, and its short lines slow the reader into each image. In the first stanza the line break after “the ruse of” leaves the reader briefly suspended before “a broken wing” completes the trick, so we experience the bird’s performance almost as the speaker does. The repeated word “guarded” links the meadowlark’s eggs to the speaker’s wounds, but the objects are tellingly different—one is external and living, the other internal and painful. The second stanza is one line shorter than the first and drops the natural image altogether, turning to the direct address “you.” The line “twenty years” sits alone, giving the number a heavy, almost exhausted emphasis. The final phrase “the same way” closes the poem without explanation or apology, leaving the reader to see how fully the speaker has adopted the bird’s strategy.
The grammar quietly repositions the speaker. In the opening she is the object of the bird’s performance—“practicing on me”—a predator or intruder being misdirected. By the second stanza, she has become the bird, and “you” has taken her old place as the one being deceived. This reversal makes the analogy more than decorative; it confesses that the speaker has learned to see herself as a creature defending a nest, with all the secrecy that implies. The wound is no less real for being hidden, but the method of protection has become inseparable from the injury it imitates.
Imagery carries the argument. The meadowlark’s “broken wing” is a visual performance, a false wound used to protect what is hidden. The word “practicing” is crucial: it suggests rehearsal, an audience, and a skill learned over time. The speaker has had twenty years to perfect a similar act. Yet the poem leaves the exact nature of her ruse ambiguous. She may have pretended to be more hurt than she was, dragging a visible injury across the surface of the relationship so that no one would look at the real nest of pain. Or she may have performed a false recovery, using a noisy display to convince “you” that all was well. That ambiguity mirrors the ruse itself, because a performance works only if its true motive stays hidden. The sound of the poem is quiet; there are no end rhymes, but the echo of “broken wing” in “wounds” and the repetition of “guarded” create a soft musical thread between the two stanzas.
The title, “Seventy-Eight,” deepens the sense of long-held concealment. If it is read as an age, twenty years of guarding wounds becomes roughly a quarter of a life; if it is a private marker, its meaning is deliberately withheld, much like the wounds themselves. The poem does not tell us what the speaker’s wounds are or why she needed to protect them from this particular “you.” That silence is part of the poem’s honesty: it respects the privacy that concealment creates. What makes the poem significant is its compression. In only a few lines, a common bird behavior becomes a mirror for human intimacy, showing how instinct and habit can blur, and how a person can spend decades performing a broken wing while the deeper injury remains untouched. The poem quietly suggests that such guarding is both necessary and lonely.