No winds blow here

April 9. Day nine of NaPoWriMo 2025 and we are tested with the task of writing a work that rhymes but does not follow a set pattern or form.

Today I took an online visit to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, USA and looked at the Birdcase exhibition (yes, I know it should be two words, but hey, it’s not my museum) which brought up a conversation I’ve had with myself many times; it inspired today’s work.

---

This is where the questions live, she thought.
Amongst the dead, the stretched, the stuffed, the sewn up and misshapen necks pulled taught.
Here she spies without need of a hide, desiccated feathers, dull bills and stiff feet,
She hears all manner of silenced lives with dumbed voices compete;
For her attention.

Elegant Curlews and a once courtly Swan,
Mergansers and raptors, even fine Finches admired for their song.
There’s a harmless Bald Eagle and a parliament of Owls,
Pintails and Wigeon are motionless, waterless fowl.
A dancer pretends to be a hummingbird.

To quench her thirst for the tones and tunes bottled by life, she is served dead education.
Sacrificed for knowledge, perched on plastic bracket stations.
Glass eyes don’t fix her with their gazes,
Lustreless lines of unwaxed wings don’t turn, twist and soar in their catacomb glass cases.
No winds blow here.

Fly, fly, fly free my beauties she calls from inside,
Motionless, lifeless, so, so, so much less – the dead don’t take to the skies,
For our “love” of the living,
Every one of them died.
Imagine being the last of your kind.

She cries.
But not with her voice.
Her tears fall dry.
Not moist.
No one blinks, they can’t.

Her bare feet claw the cold marble floor,
She fills her lungs till they can take no more, and
With all of her power and all of their might,
Frees a mute Buzzard mew, an avian eulogy, that sails waaaaaay out of sight.
Somewhere, a bird sings.

---