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I could not bring that air compressor back to life. I didn't possess that gift—not the deft hand and not the clever vision. It was white men who taught me how to use tools. My father never fixed any small engine. When I was small, I'd stay awake for two or three days waiting for him to return home from his latest drinking binge. I'd go sleepless for so long that I'd hallucinate. That's the creation story of my insomnia. I think a wounded bird made a nest in my chest on every night where I didn't sleep. Those birds still reside inside me. I can feel their wings flutter and flutter in pain. I can feel the small engines of their lungs stop and start and stop and start and stop. In the funeral home for my dead father's viewing, I staggered and fell to my knees in front of his open coffin. I wept. I wept. Then I reached up, held his wrist, and waited and waited for his small engine to restart. It didn't, of course. After my father's funeral, I crawled into bed and slept for two days. When I woke, the birds were perched on my ribs. I can feel them now as I write on this insomniac night. Sing for me, I ask the birds. Sing me to sleep. Please sing me from landing to stair and stair to landing. Sing me from curse to prayer and prayer to curse. Sing me from fair to field and field to fair. Sing me from chair to bed and bed to chair. Sing, sing for my soul's repair.
This is so beautiful, I wept. Tears are my most eloquent response to poetry. I have no words deep enough. The tiny birds that nestle within you, the little engines of the soul that flew between you and your father and bound you to each other.
Your poetry is always so spare, so evocative and it brings out the child in me; it's like I'm sensing the world vividly anew.
This poem with its love and terrors and its cry is one of the best things I have read recently. Stunning, thank you so much for this.