I’m Done with Birds
Lance Larsen
Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest 2024 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Tom Howard, Poetry
After a week away to bury my mother, we found robins
nesting above our front door.
Was this a cosmic joke, one mother laid to rest,
a new mother bivouacking on the porch?
But what to do, move future chirps
to a nearby spruce, toss out five beating hearts?
In the end, we left the nest, and now we come
and go, like squatters, through the smelly garage.
But as soon as these fledglings fledge,
I'm placing a moratorium on birds.
No more feathers and bird crap in person,
and no more crooners sneaking into lines
where they don't belong. And no more
bird verbs. No flapping or hopping, no soaring
into ether or diving into the blue abyss
of an unplumbed lake. Out with hummingbirds
and house wrens, out with plover tracks
like hieroglyphs in the sand. And especially out
with nests. Weeks of brooding and hatching
and feeding above my door has worn me out.
Their nest is hope and death, mud and magnetic
tangles of an ancient cassette all at once.
Maybe Joni Mitchell, maybe Black Sabbath?
And still the chicks screech for more worms.
The world is made of calcium, hunger is a beak.
My bones hold broken time. My hands cup
grief. And the blue above just goes on and on.
My mother is gone, my mother is a ghost.
If she wants to haunt me, let her do it without
mourning doves and elegant floating hawks
to nudge her cause along. Let crickets be
her delegates, let locusts guide her bravely home.
This poem originally appeared in the Missouri Review.
