FinchSong

Cursed with a beak too small to crack the nuts
that my mother brings me,
Faced with the certainty that I must be different
from all those around me,
I grew up, somehow, but thinking
All this will change,
Spring is just around the corner,
and i'll finally leave this wretched fledgling life behind,
fly away, find a resplendent mate,
to carve a niche, all our own.

But the song I learnt
first from my mother's beak
was not my own.
And the tune quavered,
as the females twittered,
and flew away
and I, too spent to follow.

Cursed with a song that
no one recognizes me by,
Faced with the smooth shining wall
of a language barrier,
I await my doom here
on this lonely Galapagos isle

[inspired by Jonathan Weiner's Pulitzer Prize winning book- The Beak of the Finch]