Ornithology
          -- For Rashad

By Remica L. Bingham

You’re too young to know
I helped raise finches, little birds that needed mates to live.

Fed them with my hands then let them flutter
from their cage alighting bedposts, dressers, lamps.

They are long gone. One caught a cold
and, in days, was buried beneath the steps of my apartment.

In less than a week, I found the other,
a stiff feathered ball, curled inside their water-dish.

When you entered our lives—tiny, blinking
grump of a man, already coarse with the world—

I chirped out songs until you watched, wide-eyed, the familiar hymn
I’d practiced against your mother’s stomach, serenading her womb.

Your recognition—awed silence, small hand
encircling my finger—made clear

for the first time, how one small thing
couldn’t live without the other.

Even as a fledgling in this world, testing your wings,
you taught me. Listened, as I sang my love.

Copyright © Remica L. Bingham. All rights reserved. Previously published in PMS (poemmemoirstory) and is reprinted with permission of the author.

A native of Phoenix, Arizona, Remica L. Bingham received her MFA from Bennington College. She has attended the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops and has recently completed her first book of poetry, Conversion. Her work has been featured in New Letters, PMS and Crab Orchard Review. She is the recipient of the 2005 (Langston) Hughes, (David) Diop, (Etheridge) Knight Poetry Award, and resides in Norfolk, Virginia.

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