Vox Populi
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Luray Gross: The Boy and the Mockingbird
you called me, son . . . like a boy sharing his name
with a mockingbird — Robert Laidler
Once in a time not so
long ago, there was a boy
generous enough to share
his name
with a mockingbird and
a mockingbird willing, perhaps
even eager,
to carry that boy’s name,
his awkward word-bound name
within its song.
We do not know
if the bird was she or he
or they, all mockingbirds looking
the same to us.
No matter. The mockingbird sang
from chimney tops at midnight,
from thicket branches at noon.
It sang and sang until
the boy’s name became
both pianissimo and forte
while the boy forgot
the mockingbird, having
shared his name so casually,
like a crust of bread left over
from a feast or the last sip of milk
in the glass his mother had poured.
But that was not the end,
for this is a story
and you know, as do I, as did the boy,
as did the bird,
that there has to be
a raging stream to cross
or a demon to quell.
Years passed and the boy,
who had forgotten the bird,
became a man who lost
his name in the maze of daily living.
Perhaps it slipped into the compost,
or fell from his mind
into a shoe he never wore,
one designed for frivolity, or
one crafted for joy.
At first he did not miss it,
but one night, or perhaps one
afternoon, he felt the empty place
where his name used to dwell.
A blank, a dry moat, a long pause
between the I will’s and the I must’s.
The space was not really empty
for it resounded with the man’s need,
a need he finally felt like the burn
that seeps deeper into a hand
held too close to the warming flame
for too long.
Where is my name? he thought,
and finally said the words aloud,
to himself, in the troubled room
of his life.
But this is not the end either,
for this is a story, and now the teller
gives the man a quest, sets him on his
imaginary steed, to ride into the dark wood,
to emerge into the sunlight and
urge that horse forward
toward the river that gleams
in the distance
where the mockingbird
still sings, high on a branch,
forsaking every song,
but the name shared so long ago.
Here, here, here it is
the mockingbird sings,
Your name, your birthright,
your future. I give it back
into your keeping.
~~~~
Copyright 2025 Luray Gross
Luray Gross is a poet, storyteller and teacher. Her love of poems, stories and music was nurtured by parents who stole time from their work on their Bucks County farm to read, sing, and play the violin and piano. Luray’s poetry collections include With This Body (Ragged Sky, 2023).
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Lovely. As a person who grew up with old fairy tales, this poem was a delight.
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Isn’t it, though?
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I would love to see this as a children’s book!
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Oh, yes. Perfect! Thanks, Andrena! Happy New Year!
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A wonderment of an avian/human bonding story. I once knew a crow who would say hello Joe to everyone he/she met; I once knew a starling who imitated neighborhood lawnmower engines from the eves outside my apartment. Thanks for mockingbird praise. Birds can save our selves, and (apparently) our stories. We need to save them. They have trouble saying help us/ help me.
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Beautiful, Jim. Thank you.
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I echo comments here. My mom’s mockingbirds used to sing the sweetest songs. My dad sang songs from the 40s or 50s? about “ the mockingbird is singing in the lilac bush” and “mockingbird hill”. I sometimes find them on line coped from old 78s.
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copied from old 78s
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Ah this is a “fabulous” poem, Luray — as in fable and ode, a song and advice — so well written, full of stories within the story. I love mockingbirds, and have, a few times, dialogued with a mocking bird, perched on the highest ranch of the old jacaranda in my little yard. Like Eva’s bird by the music school,, my mockingbird’s songs are the loveliest — and sometimes make me worry about their possible exhaustion when they sing late into the night’s darknesses…I just regret their name — for they do not mock our world, they pick up the world’s sounds and translate them into song. Hearingbird would be better…or praisebird. For even the oddest noise is turned into song. What a perfect poem this is!
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I agree, Laure-Anne. The poem echoes the world of a fairytale or folktale, a voice from a pre-literate time when people were closer to animals.
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We have the myna birds in Europe. They can do the same. One called us ‘stupid’ one day from high up on the roof of the neighbour’s house 🙂 This is a multilayered poem, where the confusions of grown-up life can be overcome, and somewhere a mocking bird still sings our name. We’ll find ourselves again. “[…] to ride into the dark wood, / to emerge into the sunlight […]”
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It makes you wonder who taught the bird to say ’stupid.’
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Yes, we’d like to know to this day 🙂
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Lovely story and poem!
I sat on a bench next to the music school at my university with students practicing their flutes and strings. There was a mockingbird in the tree above and it replied when the music stopped. It was the most beautiful mockingbird calls I ever heard, much better than the car alarms and door clicks the ones in my neighborhood intersperse into their imitation of robins, crows, and hawks.
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An inspiring story, Eva! Thank you!
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Luray: I love this story poem. I am prepared for it first by the encounters I’ve had often from afar with the mockingbirds all over our ranch—sometimes off in the distance trying on every tune they can imagine. Have you ever passed off in whistling, a melody or call to one in full raucous and had her use it in her banter? And then Jarrell’s “The Mockingbird in “The Lost World,” where he says: A mockingbird can sound like anything/ He imitates the world he drove away/ so well that for a moment, in the moonlight/ Which one’s the mockingbird, which one’s the world?
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So good to receive your affirmation, Sean. I’ve been conversing with mockingbirds most of my life. They frequented our farm, frequently singing at night from one of the three chimneys on our three-story farmhouse constructed in 1875 to house at least two generations at a time. The Jarrell poem you mention I first encountered in The Bat Poet, where the mockingbird can’t help being somewhat imperious at times, but does manage to encourage the little bat in his efforts at composing poems.
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