City birds mark days in the grit of morning, the sun’s angle on wire, shifting winds, tossed breadcrumbs, and the municipal dump.
They remember by returning to the same branch where a mate once sang, the daily circling of the alley where that first fledgling fell, avoiding that park tree, the spot of grass where the hawk came down.
They cannot change the past, nor do they want to. They carry it— in the tilt of wings, the silence between mating calls, all the hesitations they make before— landing.
Their future is not written in contracts or resolutions, but in migration, the long arc of return. They fly toward what they know, not what they hope.
But they are not free. They are bound to memory, to instinct, to the shape of yesterday’s sky— yesterday, and all its yesterdays.
The birds have days. They have years. They have what we refuse to name: a history that does not ask to be controlled, only honored.
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