This prompt is inspired by a tweet from the amazing Frankie Choi. For your next poem for the 30/30 challenge, write a list poem of why you don’t trust birds—perhaps it is their beaks, the skill of crows in holding grudges and remembering faces, the tiny aggressiveness of hummingbirds, and the ability of most birds to fly above and defecate on the heads of their enemies (this would be why I envy them of course), their relation to dinosaurs, etc. After all, the collective nouns for many birds—a murder of crows, a conspiracy of ravens, a wake of vultures and a deceit of lapwings—do not exactly inspire confidence. Choose all birds or one particular species if one is particularly disturbing.
Perhaps you don’t want to write about fears or trickery, but do like birds. Make a list poem of images with birds as Wallace Stevens does in his “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” And here is a response poem to that from the perspective of blackbirds (that I really like): “Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man” by R. S. Thomas.
If birds are your beacons of happiness but you still want a list poem of a creature’s skullduggery, then choose another species. Perhaps you are suspicious of kittens—those plump bodies with their hidden pointy parts ever reading to attack toes, their excessive pride (and of cats) in their ass, their cruelty in playing with their food, etc.
