By: Christian Czaniecki
Dead Birds of New Zealand
Take a moment to consider the rose bush
as a colonial construct Adolescence
as a function of western excess Gender
There are more bone(s) in your
hand than there are rose(s)
I made that up there are 22
bones in your hand & infinite
roses
Wellington harbor was shaped
by a taniwha or a volcano
depending then the British
Every one agrees with that
I was shaped by sex privilege
& probably heroin
Definitely
Dead Birds in the Shape of a Cleft Note
I should have just lied
the shape of the moon
does that to us all the time
There was no more bird
sound & the sky was so
lonely it died from it
Dead starlings like grey
and brown stones formed
a cleft note of bird corpses
in a field so green it moved
in waves
I pulled my coat tighter
around my feathers I’ve never
wanted to be anything enough
to be the last of them
Spizella Arborea
America hasn’t killed all
of its birds yet but it will
A rejection of science has
lead to the failure of thermo-
dynamics in practice &
sparrows have been falling
at my feet like sputtering mud
stained engines. Charcoal
trying to burn under
water. I’ve been collecting
them in my bag & carrying
them around like chirping
ghosts feeding them bits
of my hands & my heart.
Whispering forbidden bird
songs to them. All the music
is owned & the sparrows can’t
afford to buy back their own
voices from iTunes. I’m
going to take them west
to the desert painted in
the colors of weathered
skin golden a tooth
& scarred by the wind &
persistence of living.
I take the birds one by
one from the bag & press
them against a mesa until
they turn into petroglyphs
so they can disappear the
way they were meant to
worn away by the wind
or boredom.
Christian is a poet, a teacher, and a mixed media and performance artist. When he is not drinking coffee and teaching kids to reject hegemonic power structures he is probably cuddling his cat.
"Dead Birds of New Zealand:
This poem was largely a reflection on my work in New Zealand studying how the art and culture of the indigenous people, the Maori, were incorporated into New Zealand schools. I held onto a bit of irony about being a white man, from a country built on colonialism and slavery, studying a topic that is so intrinsically tied to colonialism and the effects of that process on oppressed peoples. The poem itself tries to look at varying perspectives of singular events, to try to see a thing for its cause and effect.
Dead Birds in the Shape of a Cleft Note:
This poem is a further exploration of the themes of freedom and lack of attachment that I see in birds, and simultaneously the limitations on that ideal. I was trying to point at the irony of birds as an idea of freedom and art with the use of starlings, a bird introduced to the U.S. by a Shakespeare enthusiast that have now reached nearly 200 million in population and are an environmental blight.
Spizella Arborea:
I had a lot of ideas happening in this poem that kind of blended together in a hapless way. I talk about flight and birds a lot and chose a bird that nested on the ground purposefully to continue the idea of birds being free/not free at the same time. I was also trying to show that in the process of taking them to the desert, which is far from their natural habitat of the tundra, also taking a couple shots at US environmental policy currently with its utter rejection of common sense and science and the peril of that position."
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