Blackbird Singing


As the years passed my parents developed the language of twins,
a secret, strange language that only they could know.

It's like a bird losing feathers

It started as a chorus of unwavering patience that allowed my mother
to repeat again and again and again questions and thoughts,

even my brothers and I stopped listening as the words began to blend into sounds 
like singing from a gospel of blackbirds flapping from a pie. 

you see one float by,

My parents renamed the every day into their own vocabulary.
They renamed the clouds and the leaves, which turn inside themselves before a storm.

They renamed the berries that droop heavy from bushes in late August, 
the rose-hips, the gooseberries, the blackberries and even the dandelions. 

and there it goes – another word gone

These words from our childhood fermented like vats of wine that bubbled and popped
in the living room they had built. Words lost as if they were never there.

Together they made a language so they could speak through the holes in my mother’s  
memory and when she forgot this language too – 

one language dies every 14 days.

my father made up a new one, something only they would know,
spoken through a whispering of fingers on skin.


(Lines in italics are from National Geographic, July 2012)

© S.J. Atkinson