Mother Aya's Blue Jay

For my friend, brother, and teacher.

I am delicately knitting cherry songbirds in Eden

Cradled by hickory, lulling palm trees

Our mother’s chestnut ringlets keenly purling to the quiet, juniper tadpoles

 

Down the cobalt pond

Beaded teardrops!

Bounce!

Drizzling against the water’s polyphony

 

Harvested love letters written in alice blue whistles

Tropical candle aglow, echoing the salted, Caribbean seashore

If you lend an ear, there’s a glassy chime of a blue jay

birthed into paradise under an April flower

 

As we drowse on the tender sand,

lazing still, interwoven with the gentle breaths of the ocean

My heart is filled with rainwater

and compressed in an emerald fruit husk

 

Mother caresses our gloom with opal daylight

Her hair bathed in hibiscus

Kinglets and catbirds

Whilst my ukulele bathes in bambooed whispers

I nuzzle

Into a blue jay’s pale prayer