During the pandemic, I hear the Canadas fly over
It is quiet, dark, near ten. I hear them
nearly every night and often during the day.
On my walks I watch them nestle in tawny flocks
on the playing fields that fill the block beyond the school.
They pluck dry winter grass at leisure on grounds
deserted all this long year, fields as shut and barren
of students as the silent classrooms.
As if sharing one mind, the geese rise, bank and turn
east to City Park’s lakes while another flock descends
to the baseball diamond. They’ve unlearned migration
learned the lessons of climate change so much quicker
than we have. At night reading in bed, I hear the geese
as they pass over my roof, their cries in the cold distance
sounding like the lost shouts of children.
Dusk on the lake, with Canada geese
Living across the street from a school, I often walk its grounds. Its emptiness during the pandemic has weighed on me, a retired teacher. I know how vital it is for kids to be in those classrooms, on those playing fields. In their absence, the geese have homesteaded here. In February 2021, students have begun to return. Who knew the blare and brass of teenagers could seem a sweet song?
Your writing prompt, should you choose to accept it: Write a paragraph or a poem featuring birds. If you want, have the birds also mean something besides themselves.
We came with our dogs to a place we thought of no rain, of no people, a homesteaders meadow we might visit of crushed root cellars and cattle bones and deer scat and thick aspen to rub our fingers against its white powder, to know another world.
Then in the east gully, thinking nothing there, no wildlife, we strapped a camera to a tree and saw what we never saw ourselves all those days walking with the dogs: coyote and grazing deer, the spike-eared bobcat, fat bear cub, elk, the ghostly mountain lion winding down the night haze.
But still, so lonely, our dogs of 15 years each passed now, I stepped quietly through the woods, half-fearful of the silence, and two owls level-wing, soft-arced floated from the pine not an arm’s length away from me, and a grasshopper sparrow darted from its grass nest, its three brown speckled eggs at my feet, all life and waiting, and, there, in the small grove where I’d always walked so blindly, twin fawns, shadow and light, unfolding themselves.
Ah, Kathryn, the clear draft of a poem! What happens when you no longer walk blindly.
Ah, the geese, They always tug at my heart. You have reminded me of a poem I wrote while I was still teaching 4th grade, enough years ago it seems like another life:
November morning in the school yard,
Fingers peek like wary turtles from coat sleeves.
Sparrows tumble from cottonwoods,
A winged cataract swirling with the first flakes
And last desiccated remnants of leaves.
Children hurry at the bell,
And only the teacher would rather be out,
Listening to wind, rush of wings,
Rub and clack of naked branches,
Listening at the echoing well of his heart.
i’m also reminded of a book I read aloud to every class, “The Iceberg Hermit,” a wonderful adventure, perhaps based on fact, in which the “crying of the brave geese,” plays a deeply touching part.
I never read this one. It is wonderful, the sparrows a winged cataract swirling…bravo, Bob. I don’t know that Iceberg Hermit, wil have to look for him.
My first parakeet flew out the window before I got a chance to give it a name.
My second parakeet lived for years.
Cha-Cha loved free jazz and classical.
Rock, not so much.
He preferred his cage to the wider world of my apartment.
Curtains confused him.
(Feel free to read this as a poem about humans, freedom, and comfort.)
Poor child losing the first parakeet! Fine poem I’d say, and the parenthetical superfluous.
hello ms. dubrava! i used to take your elective in 8th grade and now i’m living in chicago- still keeping up with your blog. this is longer than your parameters but i didn’t really expect to be writing it:
an open letter to the dead bird on my windowsill
i could already tell you were dead yesterday morning, but i was in denial. you were perched on the windowsill with your head pointed westward. at first i crept towards the window because i didn’t want to frighten you, but that was no concern, because eventually i was knocking on the pane of glass that separated us and you were still poised in perfect stillness. now the morning has repeated itself like a single frame of a movie: in the background, the neighbor’s icicles, trailing across the slopes of their roof and threatening to come crashing down. and in the foreground, you and your cedar wood feathers, round and speckled, dry and deceased.
why was i surprised to see you’d stuck around? i guess i never thought to equate death to stillness. i assumed the wind would blow in after nightfall and leave your corpse to be someone else’s morbid discovery. the grey cat down the street would surely be enamored with you. she would carry you in the tender grip of her mouth to some place warmer, where you might even awake from your comatose. and how frightening would that be? drifting asleep in the frigid air and suddenly finding yourself in someone’s mud room, flailing under a predator’s gaze. but this is all an imagined scenario. you will never cross paths with this cat, as long as she’s napping on the foot of someone’s bed, and as long as you’re here, frozen in time.
i don’t want to think about how many days will pass until there’s no trace of you. if i could find a way to remove the screen from this window, i could knock you into the mountains of snow beneath us, and you could decompose in peace until springtime, when the snow would melt and reveal what’s left. instead we’re stuck in this precarious situation where, every morning, you’ll stare at me through your button-hole eyes as you transform into some mangled version of yourself, and i will pretend not to watch. this is my favorite window and now you are a part of it, for better or for worse. your hollow bones and stiffened feathers will remain here just as long as the daggered icicles clinging to the neighbors roof, expanding under the heat of the sun.
Dear Gwen, you were in my creative writing elective; if I remember correctly, you often exceeded my parameters. 🙂 What an exquisitely observed piece. To have a bit of death on your windowsill and be unable to remove it.