WAYWARD BIRD CROSSES OCEAN AND BORDERS

by Cecil Morris

When hobbyist photographer Michael Sanchez snapped this picture of a blue rock-thrush subspecies on the coast of northern Oregon last week, he didn't know how rare the bird was until he posted it to social media: a blue rock-thrush, far from its native breeding habitat in parts of Europe, Africa and Asia. —NPR, May 3, 2024

The blue rock-thrush, bewildered,
finds itself on an Oregon beach
blown thousands of miles east from its
Asian land, its native air,
the green greens of home, the known,
familiar browns, the sunset skies.
Here the seagulls speak an angry
foreign tongue, a forbidding scream,
and it’s just another vagrant,
one more illegal immigrant
someplace it doesn’t belong
and, maybe, looking for a home.

Cecil Morris taught high school English for 37 years.  Now retired, he spends his time writing poems and shaking his head at the news.  He has poems in or forthcoming from Cimarron Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and other literary magazines.

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