wildscape. literary journal

A Prayer for Birds
by Ember Jones

            After Catherine Pierce & Nickole Brown

Near the end, they were on every power line,
every suburban sapling planted too late to slow 
the slow ashing of underbrush. Mourning 
doves. Crows. Robins. Little titmice,
one gray eye cocked to the movement
on the road, the whoosh of gasoline and tire, 

the gentle rocking of branch in the wind. Speckled 
eggs in September. Flash of feather in blue, 
quick of pinion, crescent wings. Starlings 
in all their black twinkle of iridescence 
like tar and the shimmer of sunlight
on oil. On the lake, sweet-fingered children 

chucking whole slices of Wonder bread 
straight from the bag to little brown ducks 
cutting a swath through patina of algal 
eutrophy. Morning chorus of soft warbling. 
Hot sun. Domestic jungle of persistence.
Remember how there used to be more 

than the cardinal’s vermillion, steel-gray
of pigeon—the woodpeckers, petrels, little
meadowlarks, shorebirds, finches. Remembering
the majesty of eagles. Remembering
its screech, so high in the air, so sharp 
it was metallic on the tongue, a spark

for burning dawn’s fog. When there were more
than just robins speckling carefully-manicured
lawns with their fat seeded bodies. When 
there were penguins to wish upon 
somewhere up North. When parrots knew 
their native tongue of clicks and trills. 

Every dawn the sun is serenaded into horizon 
by birdsong, but it’s the same birds every morning 
and there is no migration, no star-tracking 
to find the ancestral path, no plucky mating dance 
all frills and pomade and rhythm, no knotted nests 
of pine and mud. There is just crow and robin 

and whispered prayers that, Lord, will these 
of your creations just stick around a while 
longer, please let us keep these little feathered 
blessings, please let their bellies be fat from 
insect and berry and seed—anything, Lord, 
not to lose what little we have left

to the swallowing place where the orioles went, 
the cranes, buntings, our falcons, salmon-pink 
flamingoes and silvering vireos. Deliver our birds 
back to us on storkwing or Amazon one-day shipping 
and let us raise them humanly, held close 
to our breast, hand-cupped and mouth-syringed

to be set free to the world we have built for them
of industry, ammonium nitrate, rubber, and sequins
and they will have blue seaglass for eyes, polyester
and spandex for feathers, 
and a little fiberglass heart the size 
of a breath, all prickly and still beating. 

about the author // Ember Jones