Sherman Alexie

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Dear Bird in the Detroit Metro Airport

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Dear Bird in the Detroit Metro Airport

a poem

Sherman Alexie
Feb 28, 2023
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Dear Bird in the Detroit Metro Airport

shermanalexie.substack.com


Dear subscribers,

My voice is just a croak today so there’s no audio recording. Here’s the poem only in text.


Delayed for many hours, I decided to follow a bird
from airport gate to gate as it searched

for an escape. It didn't rush. It sometimes
perched for ten or fifteen minutes

on the high architectural beams and angles.
Was it afraid? Despondent? I don't know.

I won't guess at bird-emotions. But I felt
like an airport monk silently

practicing a new feathered ceremony.
Then I wondered if somebody was following me

as I followed the bird. But, no, I was the only 
adherent of that temporary theology.

Dear Bird, my avian abbot, it's been a decade
but I still think of you in your airport solitude.

You were small, radiant,
and probably doomed.

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Dear Bird in the Detroit Metro Airport

shermanalexie.substack.com
76 Comments
Deborah Daniel
Mar 31Liked by Sherman Alexie

Small, radiant, and probably doomed... I can relate.

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1 reply by Sherman Alexie
Autumn Widdoes
Writes Wunderkammer
Mar 5

A few days after you posted this, I was in an airport and a bird flew over me. I wonder how often the end up in airports?

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