"Generic Kindness” by Isaac Pickell

Isaac Pickell is a poet, PhD candidate, and adjunct instructor in Detroit. A Cave Canem Fellow, Isaac is a graduate of Miami University's Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. He is the author of two collections of poetry, everything saved will be last (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) and It’s not over once you figure it out (Black Ocean, 2023), and his most recent work can be found in Brevity, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, diode poetry journal, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Isaac’s taken a seat in all fifty states and has so much to look forward to.

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Generic kindness

Does it matter where the birds go

—Louise Glück

So begins a poem about the allure of fleeting
passion—what drives a bird to color—they leave

here, that’s the point. She says it plain, like long winter
were a cipher whittling what we thought we knew

to nothing or unbearable change, like they cease
to exist with their song. But songbirds will come home

to the same trees, even after a thousand-mile flight
to passion—what drives a bird to roost—and it’s here

they make their future in every egg. You tell me love
poems are generic kindness, but we never tire of them,

especially now. As everything crumbles, we see the same
shapes in the debris, the same sorrow and possibility,

and what more is desire than sharing truth. Of course
you’d like to know endless summer with me: we could

take wingless flight into seamless blue sky, cross the Gulf
of Mexico in a day like a hummingbird does, and refuse

to return without the sun. But that is not the world we know
and so we must hold on even as we’ve been taught to let go

as a means of survival. For we are not birds, and this
is our winter, and we have so much to do together

before we leave the face of this earth.

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