I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Poetry is everywhere.

You don't have to look far, but you might do well to look up.

Look up and listen.

If I do that in my own backyard, at any time of year I see and hear many varieties of birds, house finches,

robins, crows, the list goes on. I think we humans are more enamored with birds than with other

creatures that fully live on land.

Just think of all the idioms we use.

Birds of a feather flock together.

The early bird catches the worm.

And even the unfortunate kill two birds with one stone. We identify

with these creatures in some ways, as night owls or odd birds, for example, and we envy them

and others, oh, to be free as a bird. There and we envy them in others.

Oh, to be free as a bird.

There is so much poetic potential in bird songs and calls,

their freedom of movement, their nest building.

Their names alone are poems in themselves. The screaming cowbird, the middle American leaf tosser, the splendid fairy wren, the society kingfisher, the milky stork, the diabolical nightjar, the long waddled umbrella bird, the dark-eyed white eye,

the bare-faced go-away bird. Yes, that's a real animal. I didn't make that up. It has a featherless face, and apparently

its call sounds like it's saying, go away. Once, during a Q&A after a reading, a woman raised

her hand to ask, what's with all the birds in your poems?

I had to laugh.

She was right.

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