“Bird Wind” by Andrea Scott
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Bird Wind” by Andrea Scott.
Bird Wind
By Andrea Scott
The cats bring in three birds in as many days. Two sparrows beneath the dining table. A junco on the
basement floor.
Bird bodies should never be so motionless. So easily snatched up.
With the last bird, I take time to stroke it. Can’t pretend this is a kindness to the bird. It is no pet. I do it
because it is still and I need to still myself.
Death looks different when there is no blood.
I know that an empty bread bag is not a tender way to transport the dead, that the compost bin is not a
grand destination.
The downy feathers won’t join the sweep-up pile. They float with the wind the broom makes. Do living
birds make their own wind?
The only thing my firstborn wanted that I couldn’t give him was a wild bird. Too fast. Too many hiding
places in the hedge. And no one wants to be a kept thing.
While Mom was dying, my aunt and uncle took my boy to the lake. The Canada geese were hard to
catch, their hisses frightful. He collected instead a fistful of feathers — a bouquet for me.
After Mom died, I bought my boy a book about death, and how the wind never really stops blowing. The
book promised that the wind just moves on elsewhere.
Where did Mom move on to?
I know the number three marks the beginning of a trend. You don’t need to say the cats need collars and
bells.
I’ve stopped putting out bird seed, and watch the birds instead in flight.
You can’t see wind until there are things inside of it, gliding or being pushed.
I think sometimes the wind just stops.
Copyright © Andrea Scott
Previously published in In the Warm Shallows of What Remains (Raven Chapbooks 2024).
Andrea Scott is a mother, writer and high school teacher living in Victoria, B.C., the traditional territory of the Lekwungen people. Publications include The New Quarterly, FreeFall, Geist, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Humber Literary Review and The Antigonish Review. Her poetry will soon ride the bus as part of B.C.’s Poetry in Transit program. Scott’s first chapbook, In the Warm Shallows of What Remains, won the 2024 Raven Chapbooks Poetry Contest.
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