Robin Call by Gabriel Sayers I practiced mimicry in the silver mirror, reciting the robin’s call as if it were essential learning— a raw decimal edge, a red siren in the pine. It was first a gift when I wheeled Michael through a collapsing forest, its wings spread like a copper gully. The cedars, bronzed fingers on the earth’s underbelly. We were black smudges emerging on the road, past green wolf-blankets of ivy into the gorse-lined footpath. There the puttering of robins— or rather felt than heard. Notes twirled in the wind, a warmed arpeggio beating quiet as a clock. Over red breasts slung worms from the soil, ribbons coaxed up by the steel gale. On the horizon, a blushing spirit lit the city, pillars of orange birthed quietly. We kept walking, the robin’s call still burning in the air, a small forge opening to its swirling flame.
Gabriel Sayers is a fourth-year Indigenous student at the University of Victoria, where he studies Anthropology and Environmental Studies. His writing is shaped by a lifelong fascination with the beauty of the natural world and by his grandmother’s gentle, persistent urging to write. His work has been previously published in Grain.
