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Self Portrait Featuring Migratory Bird Treaty Act

after Hannah Gamble

 

I wanted to be like the songbird, singing

and light. Bones full of air.  And despite

my smallness to travel great distances

 

over mountains and across large tracts

of urbanized land without respite.

I wanted migration.  To persevere

 

through instinct the first time and after

through memory, my unique know-how

and gumption. And I wanted to be beautiful

 

while doing it, a perfectly embodied metaphor

for delicacy and grace.  I wanted it

to be made federally illegal to harm me,

 

to feel that special, protected.

But the migratory songbird

doesn’t really feel legal protection –

 

it’s mostly symbolic – what they feel

most helped by are bird-feeders,

probably, and empty fields

 

where we could have built, but didn’t.




Rebecca Bornstein

levelheaded: Self Portrait Featuring Migratory Bird Treaty Act

 

The earliest lines of this poem describe a world in which even a tiny songbird can overcome its limitations. The speaker desires the fragility of “Bones full of air,” the deceptive “smallness” of a migratory songbird. She wants to need “instinct,” “memory,” “unique know-how,” and “gumption.” Her dream allows for hurdles and hardship. In her “perfectly embodied metaphor,” she uses limited resources to “travel great distances” and “be beautiful / while doing it.”

 

So, it hits hard when the speaker says, “I wanted it / to be made federally illegal to harm me.” Here, she raises the metaphor’s stakes. She’s now talking about extinction, about permanence. The metaphor also becomes more complex. She allows that a bit of outside help might be necessary. This is not a mythic, bootstraps story. It’s a story of pragmatic survival. If federal protection first seems like an oblique stand-in, it works perfectly because it helps the speaker explain that, beyond being protected, the speaker needs to feel protected. This shift is coupled with a shift in the language. The phrase “federally illegal” turns away from a vocabulary that includes “singing and light,” “delicacy and grace.” And “I wanted it / to be made” uses the speaker’s refrain (“I wanted”) to include that ambiguous “it” in a piece of odd, passive grammar.

 

On the word “but,” the poem pivots from the speaker’s vision of herself to an assessment of her vision’s viability. The poem pretends to shake off its metaphor, to wake up from the lullaby of life as a migratory songbird. But really, the poem sloughs away the artifice of wishful thinking. The speaker points at the “I wanted to” conceit of the poem’s first four stanzas and reminds us these are past tense desires. Whatever the speaker imagines, she could use the altruism of “bird-feeders.” She can hope for “empty fields” that may not exist. Even for migratory songbirds—especially for migratory songbirds—wide swaths of the world are out of control.

 

 

– The Editors