Fall of a bird

Fall of a bird

I shudder every time an animal or bird, no fault of their own, die without any farewell.

Terry Tempest Williams described how she found a whistling swan dead by sea shore, “her body contorted like an abandoned lover” her beak in sand, no one around, legs having done the last walk, upside down, like the wine glasses in a rushed bar at the end of a hard day. and how she gave the swan a quiet burial, not before lying next to her and imagining the great bird in flight. It nauseates me that there is no burial for this creature.

A few years back, In my office, from the window, I saw a pigeon dead on the tin roof above the coolant duct. We used to stand by that window to have coffee every day. I saw the hollowing eyes and the caricature decaying each day for a month. alone and quiet she lay, sometimes a breeze disturbing some feathers. No one to remember or know how much she loved who all, and what all. What she nibbled, which part of the glide over the farm contour she relished, what was her favorite fly position in a long dive across the sky.

In a sane world, I would like to believe this is a devastating news. But, the traffic kept going, people came in and out, in cars, for Friday parties, and the winter razed on. I saw her lying there in the parapet (just below the glass window), a game of hide and seek that had the dreaded result foretold. There will be no going anywhere for her.

Someday, in the not so distant future, a new add-on to the flock might want to fly close to human inhabited places and would be stared down by an elder, citing the whitest of them all who flew too close to the sky.