February 21, 2023Pigeon Dyed Pink
I too colored birds, or tried to. Mine
didn’t hatch. Every day, I peered
into the yellow incubators, hoping
to see a cracked shell, a blood spot,
a beak, something to tell me I’d have
bright chicks, like I saw at the state fair
and could bring to the science fair.
After we gave up, my father buried
the eggs out back, broke them
first to see. I was too sad to watch,
but my sister remembers a dead chick,
brilliant blue like the food coloring
I’d injected, my ten-year-old fingers
pushing the hypodermic’s plunger
after carefully poking small holes.
I wrote out a schedule for turning
the eggs. Everyone played mother hen.
My brother, who stayed up late,
turned them at night, my mother
at dawn. How I longed for those chicks,
red, blue, green. How I pictured them,
pretty and purple and soft. And then
it was over, nothing but broken shells,
dead embryos. I still made a poster
for the science fair, set out empty
incubators, talked to judges, somehow
won a first prize. My brother built
a computer and won first outstanding.
But in this year, this 1969, when everyone
knew Christiaan Barnard’s name, the boy
who sliced open two rats, moved a heart
from one chest to another, called this
a transplant, counted ten heartbeats
and said the rat lived, that boy
got his picture in the newspaper,
his two dead rats right there
on the front page.
from Poets Respond