An Ornithology of Loss
Emily L.
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This poem is an elegy to the fragmented self, a hymn to the migrations of language, memory, and identity. It unfolds like a bird in flight—its movements uncertain, its wings scarred by both the weight of forgetting and the sharpness of remembrance. The tongue, once a blade and then a cage, carries the ache of what is lost in translation, the spaces where silence becomes both refuge and exile. The poem aches through generations: a mother’s trembling voice, a daughter’s dreaming lips, the fragile echo of a homeland slipping through their hands. Each section is a molting, shedding one language for another, one self for another, only to find the residue of what was left behind etched into the marrow. It is a story of release, of carrying the birds until they cannot be held. The final migration—dreaming in a forgotten tongue—becomes an act of reclamation, soft and untranslatable.
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Creativity is a conversation between memory and possibility, rising like steam from the stew of your life—everything you’ve seen, felt, feared, and dreamed. It’s the moment you find yourself threading together scraps of the past, tying them with the fine silk of imagination, and offering it all to the present.
