A mocking sort of rusty call

From the window grackle chat, sparrow gossip, cardinal chide, a blackbird sings, so close I should see her. Before sunrise this morning a wren was close and loud. A few days ago I wrote:

The smallest bird
destroys morning
with her great song.

The trees here are quickly putting out lots of new growth, the maple and the ornamental pear are showing their colors. A few of the trees in the neighborhood have creamy white and pink blossoms already. When I look back at my Instagram from a year ago (2021), we’re at the same place. Going back another year (2020) the same; 2019 the same flowers are blooming. We moved here October of 2018. Going back through time like that makes everything look normal.

Today, on NPR, a story about a death in Ukraine of a 96-year-old man who survived four (four!) concentration camps during WWII and has been killed in Putin’s “denazification”. I always pause when I hear some circumstance of death that seems (that makes me imagine) every breath was parceled out at birth. I do the same when I hear a story that makes it seem every moment in a life had  been choregraphed to get a person to the exact second a plane hits a tower, a crane falls, a river floods. But there isn’t anything mystical or fateful about it, death is sped along so often by man’s ponderous horror. In Boris Romantschenko’s case, manufactured lies of full of horrors. 

Grackle’s have a distinctive cackle, a mocking sort of rusty call. They’re big and shiny birds, with yellow eyes, their feathers are iridescent colors of purple and dark teals on black. The talk a lot, when together they are loud. Often one or two will have their beaks toward the sky while they shout out the day’s news. Today they seemed especially animated, especially loud in their telling. Today they seemed to have heard all the other hard news of the world, the shame and sorrow that is just reaching us.