Rogue parakeets in our neighborhood
Chatter like Pentecostals,
Flash from tree to tree:
A wayward pet store shipment,
An accident in Customs,
A dying widow’s friends set free?
Like that painting by Audubon:
Carolina parakeets posed in magnolias,
Faces bright with human joy.
Their voices ring in our crushing August sun,
Dance through the knife air of December –
How to exist here, or anywhere,
So cheerfully fragile, so dangerously alive?
