#12 or, “And This Bird You Cannot Change”
My last day as a teacher / I saw a baby bird in the road /
mistook it for my students
Eyes wide shut as all innocence is
Barely enough feathers to keep warm let alone take flight
7 mins to catch my bus / indescribable weight burdening my brow
/ I ask myself how much life is worth /
A mother with her baby in a black carriage /
Her scowl a mirror of our encumbrance
The only cloth I have to carry the bird / a black mask
Fleshy thing / yet he’s got little meat and soft bones
Two infants, swathed in black, my brown body between them
7 mins to a lifetime
/ I decide that bird years and human years aren’t so different /
A wounded heart can make you play God /
I learned today
Cradling life and death gently in cupped hands
Purpose a mere bus ride away
Leave him in a park at the base of a tree / mistaking him for my student
My black mask wasn’t the only thing I left with him
/ I wonder if my father dropped me flying the nest /
Another baby bird died the day I decided to leave home / loud herald in his little voice
Same town, different road
I knew I wasn’t his teacher
Yet I picked up the weight just the same
As I did, a black woman driving a short school bus looked on at me in horror /
if only he’d been a child, maybe she’d have offered him a ride
A white bag between his little body and the veins in my palm
/ I stared down my death in the road, and I offered him safe passage /
This time I remembered the animal hospital / on a corner I frequently passed but rarely saw
Told me they didn’t treat birds
Looked at everything but the life in my hands
Felt just like my mother’s gaze
I had no home to bring him to / left him under a redbud tree
/ We both know what it means to be strange fruit /
Prayed for his passing / he gave me hives, still I cried to put him down
/ I packed my bags and told my mother I was leaving that night /
A month since I flew the coop / all the birds I see are grown now
Soaring in the sky / I don’t know these roads / all the birds I see are grown now
Skin on my hands and feet peeled heavily / making room for my new self
I suppose I was growing the feathers those babies never got to
A week before fall / I’m walking on uncharted pavements
I don’t look back
/ Knowing I left the old me at the base of some trees /
