birds – Sarah Stoltzfus Allen

Two for Mirth

A pair of crows are arguing on the fence
across the street from my office window.
It’s not a big argument, full of caws
and flashing beaks. No, it’s a comfortable
quarrel of picking feathers and well-reasoned
fluffing feathers and hopping away a few inches.

One has flown and I am sad for the remaining,
sure that sorrow has come to stay.
She flutters away for a moment or two,
but she always comes back to the same perch.
Her eyes search the sky and I know if I look later,
evidence of her nervous talons will be seen on the wood.

I’ve finished my breakfast and I’m starting the second
cup of tea, consumed with numbers and calculations.
Human issues of taxes and income and lost revenues
take up the majority of my mind, but occasionally my eyes
flit to the waiting crow. She’s still there on her fence rail.
I assume she’s anxious for his return, but maybe she knows

right around 10 o’clock a sweeping black will cross my sight.
I watch him settle beside her, a peanut in his beak
and a shiny ribbon tangled about his foot.
The peanut is passed between them, the ribbon swaying pretty.
A comfortable quarrel continues, but the hopping away is traded
for gentle nudges, head touches, while spring laughs around them.

Rain Birds

It was only the occasional flutter
of wings and the soft cooing
that gave them away.

They crowned the clocktower,
looking every bit a part of the architecture,
and I wished I had their job:

fly and coo, find food and flutter in the rain,
exist because they are
with no questions asked.

Surely, if I climbed up to them
they would take flight,
not knowing my intention

is just to sit and rest,
rest in the knowledge that I am
and that fluttering in the rain washes everything clean.

Trash Birds

Don’t call them trash birds,
Granny always said while she walked
towards Walmart and watched the flock
circle and swoop from the neon sign
to the parked cars to the discarded
French fries and spilled milk shakes.
We don’t mock one of God’s creatures
for doing what they were designed to do.

I can’t count the names thrown my way,
can’t count the ways they have all crumpled
and collected against my ribs
and throat like pieces of garbage
flung from a speeding car on I-64:
too much, not enough, slut, crazy, needy,
attention-seeking, a waste of time, bitch,
not good enough, unfit
to name a few.

So, I never call them trash birds.
I call them by their proper name
and watch with delight when they take flight
as one dancing phantom,
dark against the fiery October sky.

In my dreams, each grackle in the plague
settles on my shoulders and picks up a name,
swallows it down, unhurt and nourished –
doing what they were designed to do.