The Meaning of Birds by Charlie Smith
it is not news that we live in a world where beauty is unexplainable
The Meaning of Birds
Of the genesis of birds we know nothing, save the legend they are descended from reptiles: flying, snap-jawed lizards that have somehow taken to air. Better the story that they were crab-apple blossoms or such, blown along by the wind; time after time finding themselves tossed from perhaps a seaside tree, floated or lifted over the thin blue lazarine waves until something in the snatch of color began to flutter and rise. But what does it matter anyway how they got up high in the trees or over the rusty shoulders of some mountain? There they are, little figments, animated---soaring. And if occasionally a tern washes up greased and stiff, and sometimes a cardinal or a mockingbird slams against the windshield and your soul goes oh God and shivers at the quick and unexpected end to beauty, it is not news that we live in a world where beauty is unexplainable and suddenly ruined and has its own routines. We are often far from home in a dark town, and our griefs are difficult to translate into a language understood by others. We sense the downswing of time and learn, having come of age, that the reluctant concessions made in youth are not sufficient to heat the cold drawn breath of age. Perhaps temperance was not enough, foresight or even wisdom fallacious, not only in conception but in the thin acts themselves. So our lives are difficult, and perhaps unpardonable, and the fey gauds of youth have, as the old men told us they would, faded. But still, it is morning again, this day. In the flowering trees the birds take up their indifferent, elegant cries. Look around. Perhaps it isn’t too late to make a fool of yourself again. Perhaps it isn’t too late to flap your arms and cry out, to give one more cracked rendition of your singular, aspirant song.
Indistinguishable from the Darkness (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991)
Birds are the part of nature that learned to move<3
This poem feels like someone holding wonder and heartbreak in the same breath, knowing both belong to being alive.
The imagined origins of birds reveal a longing for gentler stories, as if the heart needed beauty to be born softly.
There’s something deeply human in watching a creature soar and feeling both joy and the fear of how easily it can fall.
The sudden deaths — the tern on the shore, the bird on the windshield land like reminders of how fragile beauty truly is.
The poem understands how grief becomes harder to share as we age, how our inner language stops matching the world’s.
Its reflections on youth fading feel painfully honest, like someone realizing that wisdom never promised warmth.
Yet it refuses to collapse into despair; it turns toward morning, toward trees blooming again, toward birds singing anyway.
Their indifferent cries feel like life whispering that it continues, even when we feel worn thin by time.
The final invitation to be foolish again, to sing again feels like a hand held out to the tired parts of us.
What lingers is the quiet courage of trying once more to rise, even if the flight is small and trembling.