Mockingbird
It’s not that often that I laugh out loud while reading a poem. But this poem, “Mockingbird” by Louis Jenkins, had me chuckling several times. It so perfectly captures the slightly disconcerting but rather everyday discrepancies in memory we detect when reminiscing with siblings. And then there are the minor wounds or lightly held grudges of our youth that emerge. And then the character traits of siblings or parents, beloved or vexing, that surface as we try to reconstruct the past.
The past – that collection of slippery recollections and benign fabrications we stitch together to anchor ourselves in the present and orient ourselves to the future. It may not – actually most likely is not – nearly as certain as we would like to believe. But in the end it hardly matters. What matters is the story we have told our self and the sights and sounds and smells that story evokes, as real and then some as anything that ever happened.
Mockingbird
I remember when I was a child I had a pair of canaries
in a cage in my bedroom. I had the idea that I would
raise and sell canaries. I asked one of my sisters if she
remembered them. She remembered that they were
parakeets, not canaries. I asked another sister. She said
she didn’t remember any canaries but she remembered
how mean I was to her. My youngest sister doesn’t
remember having birds but thinks that we had a pet
rabbit. I don’t remember that. My brother thinks we
had a pet crow that talked. I don’t remember a crow
but I remember we had a myna bird for a while that
said, “Hello sweetiepie,” but he belonged to someone
else. My mother says that she would never have
allowed birds or any other animals in the house. I
remember how the female canary ignored the male
but chirped plaintively to a mockingbird that sang
outside my window all summer long.
Louis Jenkins, “Mockingbird,” from Tin Flag: New and Selected Prose Poems
I really love this poem especially when the mother’s comments to his memory of birds. I often recall memories of our family to my younger brother and see that pained look on his face as he tries to agree with my memories and I know he hasn’t a clue. He had a cock, a goat, that ate all my mother’s daffodils, a hamster and then wanted a HORSE – in our back garden in suburbia! thank you for making me laugh. is x