Ode to a Homing Pigeon

Ode to a Homing Pigeon

O gray-winged compass of the open air,
Small pilgrim stitched of feather, bone, and will,
You rise from trembling hands and شهری streets,
From docks that smell of salt and rusted chains,
And set your breast against the waiting sky
As if the world itself had called you home.

No crown declares you noble. No bright song
Spills from your throat to charm the morning crowd.
Yet in your eye lives something older still—
A quiet map no empire ever drew,
A memory of roofs and chimneys warm,
Of grain-scattered yards and patient doors.

You carry more than notes tied with thin string.
You bear the ache of distance, human hope,
The whispered please of soldiers far from fields,
The folded love of someone left behind.
While guns rehearsed their thunder on the ground,
You threaded peace through shrapnel and cloud.

Wind tests you. Storms unwrite the sky in ink.
Hawks carve their questions sharp against your path.
Still, you correct, you circle, you persist—
A living answer to the word return.
Muscle remembers what the mind can’t name;
The heart knows north when reason breaks apart.

O faithful hinge between the then and now,
You teach us this: that home is not a place
Pinned neatly on a grid of lines and rules,
But something felt, a pull behind the ribs.
You teach us trust—how letting go can mean
The surest way of finding one’s way back.

Fly on, soft herald of the unseen thread
That binds the lost to what they love the most.
Fly on, and may we learn, in watching you,
To follow what is true when skies go dark—
To carry light, however small it seems,
And aim it, always, toward home.