NOTE: The excerpts included in this essay are from Dawn Songs: A Birdwatcher’s Field Guide to the Poetics of Migration, edited by Jamie K. Reaser and J. Drew Lanham for Talking Waters Press, 2023. The proceeds from Dawn Songs benefit the American Bird Conservancy’s Conservation and Justice Fellowship program.

The term ‘lament’ is typically associated with grief, with sorrow, with loss. Maybe the loss is physical – a beloved passes. Maybe the loss is etheric – a longed for dream of what could be is dissolved by circumstance.

Those who have awakened to the nature of dawn songs lament the loss of birds.

1.
“There is a poetics of grief, just as there is a poetics of migration. Both involve pattern and form. A grieving heart takes on a sort of pattern, just as migrating birds move together in a form. There is a rhythm and resolution to both, too. We presume peace and perhaps even joy will return to the grief-stricken, and migrating birds trust, in their birdlike way, that they too will find resolution – in blossoms, berries, or barnacles – at flight’s end.” 

2.
“Falling. Falling out of the sky – in North America, a drop of 3 billion birds in fifty years – poisoned maybe, starved, some of them, lying dead at the base of skyscrapers or wind turbines, lying dead where cats left them on the welcome mats, dying with eggs in their bellies and no place to build a nest, their songs drowned, their wings broken. A swallow is a tiny thing – it weighs no more than eight pennies. But over 150 million years, it has learned to sail on the sky. When the last swallow plunges to Earth, surely the sky also will fall.” 

3.
“I imagined the swallows returning the following May to look for their homes as they had for hundreds of generations. Imagined them finding their homes not just torn up but entombed in stone.”

4.
“Rivers of robins
Stream past in late October
Nowhere else to go”

As the birds go, so goes our innocence. So goes a connection, a belonging, to something beyond ourselves…

5.
“…your breaths dwindled
eyelids blinked slowly
closed longer each time

then came the stillness
of the absence of soul –
something undeniable
I first felt when
our first dog died –
from breath to no breath
in the slightest flicker of time”

6.
“My heart swelled at your magic
then ached when my daughter cried because you were so beautiful.

I cried too
for your journey cut short.
And wondered where you felt pulled to be [as you migrated northward].
Gone.”

7.
“Fluffy is a birder, too,
I’m very sure of that.
She watches them intently,
From right there where she’s at.
Beside that dead bird’s carcass,
Placed on the front porch mat.”

8.
“Sometimes you are perfect as anyone but a storm comes too soon. And you’re caught in a bad place young and you get smacked too hard to ever stand up again. It’s just luck. It’s not you.” 

9.
“I’ve been looking up since I was a boy
There are less now but I keep looking
I’ll never stop trying to find them
I’ll spend all my days searching
They have to be somewhere

The sky isn’t what it used to be
It was always so full
Now there’s much less to see
A sky without them is only blue
A sky without them is only grey
A sky without them is nothing but clouds”

Too, there may be the arrival of a painful kinship of familiarity when we realize our journeys – nature and human nature – are not so distinct.

It is from this perch – this vantage point – that we may come to realize that the absences we feel may be the greatest within…

10.
“You, who are a migrant,
You know well the pain
Finding that upon your return,
What you loved is gone.”

11.
“Come back to me.
Come back to me like a bird
Returns in the spring –
Famished and full of song.
Come back to me.
Won’t you come back to me?”

12.
“This morning she draws outlines of children
who have been killed in gun violence,
during border crossings, white chalk on cement.
The swallows circle overhead, a sweet call in B-flat;
They carry our hearts with them.”

13.
“One the same day three police officers pinned Mario Gonzalez
face down in the mulch
And watched as he drew his last breath
in a park right down the street from my house,
dozens of least terns returned to the six-mile island where I live.
Flying right over his body, the long-endangered birds arrived
in Alameda,
where they have built one of their most productive breeding
colonies in the world.
At only nine inches long with a wingspan of nearly 20 inches,
the smallest member of the gully family flies more than 3,000 miles
from Central and South America every spring to get to our
urban island.”

14.
“Oriental? Antipodes?
Words [bird names] are colonist loot
Tags whose meanings unroot and seize
And keep the “natives” mute.”

15.
“…The door swung shut
and the hummingbird was left to zip and swing
through all that vaulted space, to migrate only
from leather to brass and patter like a great
and solitary bee against sun-splashed windows.
Months later, after such luxury and no way to love,
this shimmery mummy. Another guest walks up,
grabs my wrist, and says, Oh can I have it?
I could make something! reaching for her purse.”

16.
“Each year, we are less
until soon
we may be only a hole in the sky
the size of a broken heart.”

25.
“Even this heart, wounded
and bruised, can’t help but open
to the wheeling of nighthawks,
how they arc and sweep
as the sun disappears
and then continue their swooping
long after the light is gone.”

26.
“And now that I know this dove,
who’s sound turns itself like a key
into the quiet hallway of my bones,
is not misnamed as the administrator of mornings
but who knows mourning as a pathway to divinity—
who laments with the rising and falling tides of
this troubled world, who grants me permission
to grieve even when grieving has gone out
of fashion.”

27.
“Let a blue heron nest in my heart
This is how I start
Let my hands turn currents in rivers
Let me feel the shiver

May she weave my weary bones
Into the leaves that twine her home
May my eyes shine with her dreams
The world is more than it seems”