It’s not your fault, little starlings. Brought here
by a Shakespeare enthusiast—no, it wasn’t your choice
to leave your native lands. Yes, you mob
your way through crops, converge in our cities, race your way
to the nesting cavities of bluebirds and woodpeckers.
Sometimes, even, parasitic, stashing a desperate, sunny-
blue egg with another to raise. Oh, but your name—
starling, like an adolescent star, raucous and insistent.
And your shine, your slick, oil-spilled plumage. Those
white-dotted ellipses, a scattered pattern. That quick stride,
those stubby legs. Square-fanned tail bobbing as you stab
for worms and seeds. Stocky body made for muscling up,
little bully. Passerine, songbird. Language learner.
You take off in some coded lingo of community, wheel
and turn, expand and contract, trail off, come together,
and settle. So common now. So overlooked. I often stop to watch
this easy, faithful unity. I long for that landing.
From just a few birds, you spread across
this wide country and made a living like any of us.
Maybe you’d steal the sun and rain from us all, to live
is to consume—and we are, indeed, thieves ourselves,
are we not? Most of us scattered settlers too. No,
I cannot fault you for thriving. It’s what a good life does.
And this is luscious and fruity, insecty soil, this land,
this earth. Lately I’ve been wondering
how any of us can prove that we no longer long, and
what it takes to belong, here, and anywhere.
—
Mistee St. Clair is a Rasmuson Foundation and Alaska Literary Award grantee and has been published by The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Common, Northwest Review, SWWIM Every Day, and more. She is of European and Tanana Athabascan descent and is an enrolled tribal member of the Native Village of Minto. She lives in Lingít Aaní (Juneau), where she hikes, writes, wanders the mossy rainforest, and is an editor for the Alaska State Legislature.
