Beard of Birds

by Sandra Kasturi

Once I heard the story of an old man living in the forest, birds nesting in his enormous beard instead of flying south for the winter. He would dole out bear hugs to bears until they grew weary of his persistent affection. The man had the bearing of a luminous stained-glass saint, one of those who communed with animals, who had given up the evils of the city, its bear markets and pneumatic cars, its neon fibrillations. He would move silently over the winter on bearpaw snowshoes, the birds in his beard long asleep, head to deep conferences with foxes and martens in the woods, bear-pit sessions where they sorted out the political rivalries of lynxes and obnoxious mountain goats. The bears themselves liked him so much they gifted the old man the bearskin of some grizzly ancestor, told him to wear it under the full moon, and he did, he did that very thing, becoming a shambling snout, a toothy grin, more beast than man, able to understand fully the strangeness of wild things. He thought, I can beat this thing, beat the terrible humanity out of me. The birds stayed with him.

And he fulfilled his promise, discarded the sense of his own body like an old beater left by the side of the road when it just won’t run anymore. The old man, he did become a saint of sorts, to the birds and fish and furry mammals, even to the insects, who had previously only sanctified their own, but the man’s beatific face shone into the nests of ants and wasps, followed the trails of beetles in their busy working hours and won even them over. I heard that the old man’s beatification was performed by an ancient eagle, whose feathers had been touched by God himself. The man stands there still in his borrowed bearskin, his beard of birds, his own beatitudes, the very wilderness itself. That’s the story I was told, and that’s how I’ll tell it.

Sandra Kasturi is a mixed-race poet, writer, editor and book reviewer. Her work has been published in various venues, including The New Quarterly, Rattle, Prairie Fire, ARC Magazine, Taddle Creek, and 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin. Her poetry collections are: The Animal Bridegroom and Come Late to the Love of Birds. She has won the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and HWA Awards for editing/publishing and Sunburst Award for fiction. Her poetry has won multiple awards and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2024. Sandra is fond of red lipstick, G&Ts, and Idris Elba.