Elegy to a Red-Crowned Amazon
On the day you died, cotorro, I learned why the caged bird shrieks, why you had that beady look in your eyes. I only ever saw you through the bars behind which I put you, except for when I first met you and you were free.
I found you in the backyard of my aunt’s house in Tamaulipas, during a family vacation from our home in Texas. Even though the rest of your green body camouflaged you among the foliage, the band of red feathers that adorned your crown were hard to miss. You were serene and stealthy like the first spring wind. And at the same time you commanded the force of many gales. You breezed through the trees, hopping between branches eluding me.
But I had a cacahuate, so you came down to snag it from my hands, and once I had you there I snagged you from your home, forever. I mimicked your dance through the trees and ran to my aunt’s in excitement. Beloved, red-crowned amazon: I loved you so much when I saw you that I could not resist caging you, that way you could stay with me forever. My family loved you too. The time came for us to depart, so we decided to take you with us on the car ride back home to Texas.
You couldn’t possibly cross the border legally, so we had to come up with a solution. We stuffed you in a random shoebox and jammed it under my seat. No way Border Patrol would take us from you, no way at all! You were remarkably quiet and we loved you so much in that moment!
We loved you so much that we took you to the veterinarian, where they clipped your wings. We loved you so much that we gave you a permanent home, in a cage inside our home.
You were so chatty. You mimicked our voices and repeated our phrases. Burro!, you would say. Mom got into the habit of calling for me across the house by yelling, and you picked up on that too. One time you copied her voice so well that I was shocked to find my mom asleep and you snickering as you ate a cacahuate. Your black tongue searched for the nut inside as the husk fell to the bottom of your cage, with the other scraps. The sound of you eating nuts will never leave my mind’s ears.
And as the years went by your chatter turned into screams and screeches. Deafening yelps and howls emanated from your lungs and out of your beak anytime we walked past your home, in the cage. Back and forth, day after day, back and forth, day after day I walked past your cage. Like candle wax, years melted away and fell, layering above one another like the layers of nut scraps and excrement that collected at the bottom of your cage.
How many layers formed? How many moons phased in and out before I decided to free you from the cage? How many suns? Ten million, perhaps, and on that night I resolved to free you from the cage on the following day.
When the ten million and first sun rose to warm the land and all of the living things on it caged to this planet by our creator, I found you laying atop the mountain of husked seeds. Overnight, you perished. We loved you so much.
We loved you so much, so we put you in a shoebox and jammed it under the dirt of our garden, between the rosemary and mandarins. We loved you so much, so we held a candlelight vigil for you and imagined that the angels guided you across the border of our world and the next.
Every now and then, when the sun is burning hot or when the night concedes to the ceaseless hum of the freeway, I receive your chatter and screeches via waves sent from afar, and remember why the caged bird shrieks.
