Safia Jama on “Remembering Our Birds”

I watch sunrise on square windows
that remind me of those reflective aviator glasses
people sometimes wear—

I bought a pair that first spring you visited me,
and I wore them without irony,
just as I used to wear everything.

I left my wardrobe at our old apartment
you kept like a museum, not moving a single
pillow for a year. Your main design contribution,

two Australian zebra finches, purchased that April,
our first big rumble. I left, and you replaced my absence
with caged birds. When I returned in the fall, I learned

to accept our new pets, the vestige of my leaving, the symbol
of our ongoing troubles. When we fought, the birds fought.

When we loved, the birds preened and on the afternoon
I packed to go to my mother’s, you picked a newly
hatched chick off the kitchen floor and placed it
in the palm of my hand.

You have to keep it warm or it will die!
My heart had fled the coup, I didn’t care,
only I didn’t want that warmth to leave,
and we named the chick Baby.

I went to my mother’s a week, and Baby grew bigger,
and the parents raised Baby until she became full grown
and belligerent. I had no idea what it meant to save a life
that would eventually turn around and attack,
but then again, I’m not a parent.

This morning, I watched the sunrise across the windows
where I have been a nesting here these nine days.

Olive, the finch that I chose from the pet store, died last year.
You said when you looked into her eyes, she looked back
and called in tears when Olive was ill. You took that $15

bird to the vet and spent $400. She didn’t make it,
but I was glad you tried, and so were you.

That’s when you found Emily, the small white bird
meant to replace Olive. Pip never took to Emily, though,
so you kept her in a studio apartment nearby and you told me
she enjoys her solitude and spends her time
contemplating poetry.

Last Thanksgiving, our second year apart,
you were out all night, and when you came home,
Emily had drowned herself in the fish tank,
her white feathers bobbing among the Amazon weeds,
Sir Claude, your prized fish, looking on perplexed.

I said it was a very literary death, and felt disturbed and sorry
and fascinated. We were out walking in the snow and you
were trying hard to be kind.

I felt something new,
something akin to the frozen snow—
the winter sun burning the bare trees
touched a pain I needed to feel, to know
that I am still here and alive.

Those first birds, the vestiges of our troubles,
we buried tenderly, side by side,
in Flushing Park beneath a weeping cherry
not far from where I was born.



LaGuardia Plaza Hotel *
January 13, 2021



Reprinted from Crowded House (Beltway Editions, 2023) with the permission of the author. Originally published in Prairie Schooner. All rights reserved.