76 Comments
Mar 31, 2023Liked by Sherman Alexie

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

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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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Nailed it!

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Mar 2, 2023Liked by Sherman Alexie

Thank you, Sir. Juxtaposition is my middle name . . .

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Mar 2, 2023Liked by Sherman Alexie

Dammit, Sherman, now I've got to go off & try to write that poem about the birds that inhabited the upper reaches of the U of Illinois library in Urbana when I was there! You'd have thought it was an atrium. Presumably, they were there for enlightenment, not just to be near fellow flyers. FYI, my mother had a great phobia of birds.

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Thanks. It reminds me of the disaster movie 2012 starring John Cusack whom I have personally alerted to geoengineering. https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/geoengineering-watch-global-alert-news-july-24-2021-311/#comment-1855244

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Mar 2, 2023Liked by Sherman Alexie

I always wonder why birds will seldom fly down to escape, I suppose it's because they have always had the sky to do so.

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This brings to mind the movie, Truman.

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Mar 1, 2023Liked by Sherman Alexie

Yes., sometimes in Home Depot too. And I never know whether they're stuck or thrilled to be beyond getting removed. I had a friend who worked in Costco and said the birds were a sanitary issue no one could figure out how to address.

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Mar 1, 2023Liked by Sherman Alexie

Have spent a great deal of time in the Detroit Metro airport!! Wonderful poem!!!

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I love the couplets with perfectly suited slant rhyme to what I read as loss and and even hope in the last couplet of radiance and doom.

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Mar 1, 2023Liked by Sherman Alexie

Perhaps the bird was an invasive species, seeking to return to his ancestral homelands. Perhaps he found a way into the cargo hold of a jumbo jet and made it to what should have been his home, if not for the intervention of humans.

I wonder if the birds there understood him, with his American- accented song. Did he still feel like an outsider?

Did he land instead in a different country, to continue his invasive heritage? Maybe he only grew up with invasive species and wanted to see what it was like to be bad-ass like them?

OR, did he get to the airport and decide that his life here wasn't so bad, but he had made such a big deal of leaving and had a blowout goodbye party with his friends and so couldn't return to them? If he wasn't a chicken, would he be angry about being accused of 'chickening out'?

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"SO FINE . . . " I like how the bird is flying, light as a bird, so to speak, all around, in what seems from the picture to be bright and open space (yet really closed), and then we're led to the dark, heavy closing, but still "radiant."

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Mar 1, 2023Liked by Sherman Alexie

and your images of your airport abbot will stay with me, I'm sure for as many

years. I sometimes see sparrows in the Costco rafters and try to figure whether they're living there with purpose or are also doomed.

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Mar 1, 2023Liked by Sherman Alexie

Good stuff. The stuff of dreams.

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Beautiful piece! I love watching and following anyone who copes better than I.

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