Avian Nights

Avian Nights


Starlings have invaded our home and
filled our eaves with their shit-soaked
nests. Rats with wings.
They are scavengers we pay to have
killed by the quick exterminator
who sings

In Spanish as he pulls three baby birds
blind and mewling, from the crawlspace
above our son's bedroom.
Without a word, the exterminator
uses a thumb

And finger to snap the birds' necks--
crack, crack, crack--then drops
their bodies to the driveway below.
For these deaths, I write him a check.
This is his job. He neither loves
nor hates

The starlings. They just need to be
removed. Without guilt, the exterminator
loads his truck with dead birds
and the tattered ruins of nests;
twigs, string, newspapers.
It is cold

When he drives away and leaves us,
mother and father of a sick son,
to witness the return of the
father and mother starlings
to their shared children, to their nest.

All of it gone, missing, absent, destroyed.
The starlings don't understand synonyms
as they flutter and make this terrible
noise: the scree-scree-scree
of parental instinct,

Of panic and loss. We had to do this,
we rationalize. They woke up our son
with their strange songs
and the beating of wings
through the long, avian nights.
Then, at dawn

The babies screamed to greet
the morning light. What could they've
been so excited about? What is
starling joy? When a starling finds
a shiny button, does it dance
and shout?

Do starlings celebrate their days
of birth? Do they lust and take
each other to bed? Are they birds
of infinite jest, of mirth and
merriness? How do they bury their
dead?

We will never know how this winged
mother and father would have buried
their children. Our son almost died
at birth. His mother and I would
have buried him in silence

And blankets that smelled like us.
These birds don't believe in silence.
They scream and wail. They attack
the walls. We have never heard such
pain from any human. Without fail,

The starlings mourn for three nights
and three days. They fly away,
only to carry back insects like
talismans, as if to say they could
bring back the dead with bird magic.

As if their hungry children could cheat
death and suddenly appear with open'
mouths. At birth, our son suffocated,
his breath stolen as he swallowed
his own shit. Faith

In God at such times seems like a huge
joke. To save our son, the doctors
piped the blood our of his heart
and lungs, then through his throat,
via sterile tube, via the smooth cut

Of his carotid, then sent his blood
through the oxygen machine, before they
pushed the red glow back into him.
This was new technology, and he lived,
though he crashed

Twice that first night, and spent the
next five weeks flat on his back.
His mother and I sat at his bedside
eighteen hours a day.
Scree-scree-scree;
we cawed and cawed to bring him back.

We attacked the walls of the ICU
with human wings. Scree-scree-scree.
Grief can take the form of starlings,
of birds who refuse to leave the dead.
How much love, hope, and faith

Do these birds possess? They lift their
faces and scream to the Bird-God while
we grow numb. The starlings are odd,
filthy, and graceless. But if God
gave them opposable thumbs,

I'm positive they would open the doors
of our house and come for us as we sleep.
We killed their children. We started
this war. Tell me: What is the difference

Between birds and us, between their pain
and our pain? We build monuments; they
rebuild their nests. They lay other eggs;
we conceive again. Dumb birds,
dumb starlings, dumb women, dumb men.


Sherman Alexie

from his book FACE.