Report #50

This week's poem, "The Illness of Windows (Junco Hyemalis)," is part of the "Field Guide to the Birds" of my book The Moon Cracks Open.

Holding that small bird that had just been killed by flying into the window at Green Point Nature Center, I was sickened by our human weakness that necessitates buildings and therefore windows. It occurred to me that millions of animals die merely because of human actions based on weakness and fear. Our illness of windows can be seen as a metaphor extending to burning fossil fuels because of our weakness against the cold and our fear of the dark; building expressways and airliners because of our fear of the Moment (it's always more important to be somewhere else than where we always are: Here); and building guns and tanks and bombs because of our fear of the "Other," and also our weakness of defining ourselves by the things we think we own and the fear that if someone steals these things, they steal who we are. An illness indeed.

The Theodore Roethke quotation at the beginning of the poem is from his poem "The Surly One."

Music this week is the haunting and uplifting "Hymn to Freedom" by Oscar Peterson from the album Night Train (Verve, 1962. It features Peterson on piano, Ray Brown on bass, and Ed Thigpen on drums.

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Report #50