COLOUR: “An Ode to the Greater Sage Grouse”

By Colleen Thrasher, 1st Place, Spoken Word

When looking at a picture of the Greater Sage Grouse,

you told me you were quite certain no such bird existed;

it was an elaborate lie, a joke, a ruse,

concocted by me,

the guy down the street obsessed with maple leaves,

and my friend who knows photoshop.

I was charmed, that you thought me so unstoppably creative,

so capable of dreaming in colour.

But the truth is, when I close my eyes, I can barely build her.

She is gray-brown;

I am frowning;

her eyes are closed;

my own eyelids flutter with effort;

her belly is darkened by dirt.

She nests on the ground.

Behind closed eyes I am lost in a sea of her mottled feathers,

and I am begging to be found by an endangered bird.

She has better things to do than find me.

I am not her child,

though I can only describe our connection as maternal or eternal

—

whichever one is supposed to last longer.

I am embarrassed by how much art and life I cannot create.

I cannot paint,

and I cannot wait the time it takes to make talent out of habit.

I am impatient,

begging my brain to conjure up an image in more colour than the bird herself possesses.

She tells me:

males of her species have yellow patches over their eyes. Why don’t I try imagining one of her kin—that it would be easier to simply begin again?

Start on a fresh page of bright white and let a different bird take flight in a safe space. Do not ask so much from us; we’re endangered after all. Maybe the thoughts will flow easier when you’re not pressing your forehead to the wall. Just breathe. We’ve waited a long time to die slowly. You can wait a little longer to imagine us correctly.

So, here I am, panic-imagining an angry, dying bird.

Here you are, laughing, that anyone would panic about something so absurd.

“She is real,” I say, gesturing around me.

You shrug, say “sure”, “as real as any of us can be.”

But that is exactly it.

The reason for the panic,

the desperate, shallow breathing,

the unquenchable need to imagine her correctly:

I am trapped in the liminal space of knowing I am real and knowing I am fake.

That every part of me is every part of her,

and when she dies, I die,

just like I too am endangered.    

I am an angry, dying woman imagining an angry, dying bird,

and in my angry, dying anger,

I want to give her colour that she did not have in her angry, dying world.

You tell me I really know how to turn mole hills into mountains.

You say it as if that is not a miracle, to create something out of nothing.

She really knows how to turn sagebrush into nests.

And I cannot help but worship her, and marvel at her ability to persist.

I am an angry, dying woman showing you a picture of a bird,

asking for you to marvel at the beauty of a world,

where she exists, and so do I, if only for a time.

Please believe me when I say,

when asked to dream in vivid colour,

I really, truly, tried.

See more good stuff from this year’s Writing in 150 competition!