Bluebird is the word

This week I learned: Do not tell anyone that you’re doing a great job of keeping up with NaPoWriMo, as it essentially guarantees you’ll miss the following day. Oops! Good thing I’ve been doubling up some days.

Today’s prompt: Amarjit Chandan’s poem “Uncle Mohan Singh” recounts, with a sort of dreaminess, a memory of the titular uncle playing the accompaniment to a silent film. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that recounts a memory of a beloved relative, and something they did that echoes through your thoughts today.

Taking this one back to happy childhood memories with my granddad, who truly must have housed every bluebird in the South Carolina upstate.

Birdhouses

Cast iron on coals.
Sweet peach cobbler
and chocolate smells
fill the picnic shelter,
the nearest roof for
miles. You pass out
hammers, nails and
carefully carved wood
pieces, then shuffle
with purpose back to me.

I press a plastic button
and bluebird calls are
piped through the rattly
speakers. At your signal
I press another and the 
barred owl shrieks, one 
explanation for ghosts.

Hundreds of times you
show hundreds of children
how to give the birds a home:
Plenty of room to look out 
for danger. None of paint’s
noxious fumes. Remove
the loose nail, tilt the door
and clear out nest remnants
every winter. With any luck,
flashes of cerulean, back by
spring.

You can’t walk through
the steep streets of our
neighborhood without 
seeing one of your boxes —
its weathered raw wood, 
facing an open expanse, 
ready to welcome 
the bluebirds home.