TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Poetry is everywhere; you don’t have to look far. But you might do well to look up. Look up and listen. If I do that in my own backyard, at any time of year I see and hear many varieties of birds: house finches, robins, crows. The list goes on.

I think we humans are more enamored with birds than with other creatures that fully live on land. Just think of all the idioms we use: “birds of a feather flock together,” “the early bird catches the worm,” and even the unfortunate “kill two birds with one stone.” We identify with these creatures in some ways — as “night owls” or “odd birds,” for example — and we envy them in others. Oh, to be “free as a bird.”

There is so much poetic potential in bird songs and calls, their freedom of movement, their nestbuilding. Their names alone are poems in themselves. The screaming cowbird. The middle American leaftosser. The splendid fairywren. The society kingfisher. The milky stork. The diabolical nightjar. The long-wattled umbrellabird. The dark-eyed white eye. The bare-faced go-away-bird. (Yes, that’s a real animal. I didn’t make that up. It has a featherless face, and apparently its call sounds like it’s saying “go away.”)

Once, during a Q&A after a reading, a woman raised her hand to ask, “What’s with all the birds in your poems?” I had to laugh. She was right: the hawks, grackles, and starlings of my neighborhood have called and swooped into many of my poems. I told her that birds are wildlife that we all have access to, no matter where we live. Birds are everywhere … in cities, in suburbs, in the country. They make cameo appearances in many of my poems, and sometimes they’re even the stars.

Today’s poem looks up, listens, and leans into the many things we can become open to by finding closeness with these familiar and strange animals.

Northern Flicker Reconsidered
by Susan Rich

If a bird could become 
a poem, and why not—

promenade through wayward
stanzas, lift their couplets

of wings—what then? A high
wik-a, wik-a alchemical spell:

a cry of the unprintable?
Could a flicker know heartbreak,

practice self-restraint?
Their fashion leans bold—polka dots

and stripes, bright cinnamon 
to morning fog hues. The male,

handsome, with his patch of mustache.
I would become his lifelong mate

should I return as a bird—celebrated
Shad-spirit, Cotton-Rump—

with the longest bird tongue
in North America.

This ode to plurality—
this epic boundless—then—

cross-stitched together 
on the pages of Northwest sky.

"Northern Flicker Reconsidered" by Susan Rich. Used by permission of the poet.