Birds!

I learned to call it a redbird before a cardinal. My mother pointed and said, “look, there’s a redbird,” and my little face turned to the sky. Where I’m from, when you see a redbird you hold your hand to your face, poke your mouth out like you’ve had someone’s lemonade without enough sugar. What are you doing? You are blowing a kiss. You want the good luck a redbird has underneath its wings.

Where I’m from, if someone leaves the screen door open too long, calling out to a cousin across the street to come over and get a plate of chicken and dumplings, and a bird of any color flies through the door, you must kill that bird. You don’t let it out of your house no matter how much it beats itself against the walls, because if you do it will take a soul with it, your uncle’s, aunt’s, cousin’s, mamma’s.

If you are walking with your cousin Tae to get nabs and a Pepsi from the corner store, and you not really looking see a lone bird feather stuck to the patchwork of grass, you are not to touch that feather because it is dirty and full of spirits. That night, when Tae is getting their hair braided in the living room while we watch Living Single, Tae will collect the combed-out pieces of hair to later flush down the toilet, not put in the trash so that a bird can’t get it and curse Tae forever.

There are Catbirds, not the birds whose calls sound like meowing, but the white-streaked tailed bird, which I believe is some type of Grackle, but that’s not the point. If you see this bird, you are to stay way. They’ll attack dogs biting at their wings, cats who will not hunt them, and children playing too close to their nest, their singing sounds like a screech.

The buzzards tell you where death lies, the turkey vultures too. The Hummingbird, all wings and head, carries death’s messages. I’ve never seen a Hummingbird without someone dying. I saw a Hummingbird at a friend’s house and uncle went, I saw a Hummingbird and my mamma called to tell me that a cousin had passed.

If superstition does nothing else, it is a survival mechanism. Superstition keeps you aware. Like I believe in God, I believe in these superstitions and their power in my writing life. To sit down and write a poem is to practice superstition. To make meaning out of the images that haunt is superstition. To say I must write or is superstition. Through superstition, we enact the Duende, “dark sound.” We cross over to that other world, while firmly planting one foot. One world has the birds, the other makes meaning of their flight.  We make strange the every day. How we craft a poem is how the world was crafted for us. How we learned to be or not be in the world. My mamma did not know she was making a poet, she was crafting a world for me to go when this one is too cruel and real.

Every bird in Cardinal (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press) is a form of these teachings teaching me, guiding the reader. If Cardinal had a theme song, it would be Nina Simone’s 1966 release “Blackbird,” or her 1959 release “Chilly Winds Don’t Blow.” One song more optimistic than the other, but both songs deal with a movement of bodies. Cardinal, like River Hymns, was a book I couldn’t conceive until a Cave Canem retreat. Cardinal was written while in the sleepy town of Lenox, Massachusetts, at The Amy Clampitt Residency, surrounded by finches, robins, and wrens. It was my first time living outside of North Carolina outside the South, where I learned the mythology of birds. The first time my dead were not a few towns over. I thought of poets and artists who left the South but still feel the pull on their roots. I thought of my family members who have never lived outside the South or who went North but eventually returned home. I thought of the complicated love a black poet has for the South. I was longing for home, but also glad to be away. I wanted to hug my mamma and I wanted to carry her away. Being in the Northeast made it possible for me to get even closer to the South, and its love and its trouble.