Finches

Birdsong has always caught the ear of the musician in me. I’m not the first. French composer Oliver Messiaen painstakingly translated a dozen or so birdsongs into musical notation, then composed a piece based on his research called, “Catalog of Birds”.

The last few years, I’ve gotten more intentional about listening to birds, despite my kids’ jibes that this is an “old man hobby.” I even downloaded an app that identifies birdsong (Merlin, by Cornell Lab). The app is fantastic and provides loads of other info (including pictures) to help with bird identification. I figure using an app puts me right in there with gen Z and makes this hobby youthful again 😉 😆

Birds have fluttered into my poems over the years, and a several will flock to my upcoming book, A Song of Glass: Dreams, Stories, and Poems. “Finches” is a set of two sonnets about unexpected birding in my backyard. Some readers might notice A Song of Glass now has a subtitle. Past books have simply had the subtitle “Poems.” But in A Song of Glass, I wet my beak with short-story & flash-fiction genres. “Dreams” is in the subtitle too because I experiment with poems based on dreams in this book.

Finches

I.
A charm of frisky, feisty finches flocks
to my neighbor’s yard, chits and chirps flying
every which way like a lit pack of Whistling 
Jacks. This attack of avian fireworks
makes my head catapult to attention
and wonder what the heck is going on
in those itty, bitty bird brains blowing
themselves to bits.  Is it a party raging
around the neighbor’s bird bath?  Or maybe
it’s something darker, like a House Finch lynch
mob gone berserk.  As I consider these
things, a squat finch lights on a dead spruce branch
nearby.  What are you doing, little finch,
away from all your flock and on my branch?

II.
The squat finch sits on the dead spruce branch, in
a hollow made as living branches cup
him in their needled hands.  Except abrupt
jerks of his head (that seem robotic, in
fact), he’s still and conspicuously silent.
Are you the finch fleeing the lynch mob? I
wonder to myself.  Did you break some kind
of finch law or code to inspire such violence?

Or are you trying to escape the flyby
fools, squawk-jocks and flirty birdies of the
party scene?  Looking for a place to lie
that’s still and secret, where the fragments of
yourself can find each other once again;
the same place I have found to rest, my friend.