Baby Bird

My good friend Kristine Matthews sent me an email last month asking me to write a blog post about a dead bird that she had found. I wrote it down on my possible blog post ideas list. It sat in the incomplete column along with other incomplete ideas such ideas as: Jason Koo, People Watching, Gay Marriage, Crissabellas, One Hour Photo, POS Pics, Shitty Drivers, Shitty Roads, Haiti, and Egypt. After a few weeks on the list, which all it said was bird blog I could not remember what I meant to write about. I had no memory of Kristine's email, or Kyle's texts. Then, yesterday, like a bolt of lightning, the memory came back to me.

So now here we are. I found and reread Kristine's email, then turned it into a poem:

I found a baby bird
on my sidewalk
this morning,
walking to my car
for work.

I felt really bad
for him
because clearly,
he wasn't alive.

I've named him Mumford
and buried him by
a rose bush
in my yard.

Kristine Matthews


You can find poetry in almost anything if you just look.

When I was a young boy I found a dying baby bird that had fallen out of its nest outside the home my father was raised in. When I found the bird, it was fighting for its life. Bees had swarmed and attacked him. Fearlessly, I shooed them away and asked my Aunt Terri for bread to feed the bird. The bird took to the bread quickly and began to look much better.

When I returned to the house weeks later, I asked how the bird was doing, and my Aunt Terri said they kept feeding him and nursing him back to health until one day he simply flew away, and until I sat here to write this I believed her.

The tree the bird fell out of is no longer there. It has been replaced by a stump, and last I looked, a small statue of the Virgin Mary sat on it.

I'm not sure if Terri lied to me that day about the bird flying away, but if so, I'm glad she did. Harmless untruths keep us happy and kind.

Kristine's bird wasn't so lucky. So it goes.