SHOWCASE SUNDAY

Suicide Ghazal

At Bonaventure Cemetery were warnings disguised as birds:
a swarm of Brewer’s black chittering, those birds.

I might have listened had they sounded like trumpets.
Instead I crept past you, forgot about the birds.

Father says the cardinal’s flash is like the apple in Eve’s hand.
I want to know: Is it a sin to want to be a bird?

If I could go back, I would at least crack the window.
I would blink my eyes and toss out seeds for the birds.

Listen: here is a hermit thrush, shyly calling you home.
It sings not of death but of the life of birds.

Come, spring doesn’t start till you see a robin bouncing across a lawn.
When a wedge of Canada geese fly over, I’ll say look at the birds.

And if it is a sin, let us never forget the Bird Girl
who once stood in this garden, arms extended to all birds.

- Irene Latham

As promised, here is the poem partly inspired by The Bird Girl statue that sits in my garden. Here's to all the birds out there, winged and wingless...

“A believer is a bird in a cage, a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing.”

- Robert Green Ingersoll