Bird Poetry at Paper Poetry
A Good Day
With a single moment
A line of pigeons alights on the tin roof of the building next to the French bakery. Strolling through the shadows beneath a quarter moon, cricket songs rise, opening into the night as this early snap of cold silences summer to sleep. Further on my walk, a slight warmth escapes from an open door of the all-night laundromat, and my notice goes up to the eaves to see a father-bird huddled against a mother-bird on their tattered nest of twigs tucked just out of the wind. Floating from the laundromat door, I hear the unmistakable strains of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. My heart leaps with a horn blast, and I am transported to Paris, 1910. *
Tonight, an inevitable wonder comes to mind. How does one feel when things come in muted shades, experience shifts from the grand to scattered moments of a subtle joy, when absolutes soften to relativity. What if amidst disappointment can be a nuanced joy. Perhaps happiness resides in God’s will alone and within my discerning perception is the key. I ponder if it all comes down to spirit when it rises, when you learn to search deep to find what you need from what is.
Get Elisa Affanato’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The grayness before dawn brightens with the new sun. Old scraps of newspaper mix among crisp leaves rising into the scene along Seventh Avenue. Later, there’s grace in a cool rain that glistens the street, and I find a stone large enough to kick along a whole block of crumbled sidewalk. Maybe sublimity can be a state of balance — a day without the slightest tinge of pain, a kind of beauty found in subdued light. And a day becomes a good day with a single moment idle enough to walk by and notice a pair of nesting pigeons.
© Elisa Affanato
* Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite was first performed on June 25, 1910, at the Opéra de Paris.
I wish to thank the editors of Paper Poetry for their birds prompt and for providing a place for my poem.
Thank you, always, to my dear readers.
