Poem: "The Wingdresser's Kitchen"

I love it!

I wish I could have dots of gold paint on *my* primaries!

I do love this. It took my imagination by the scruff of its neck and shook it. This may be a bit long for a comment, but this is what came out of it.

Winged Destiny

All the models
And the people of good breeding
And impeccably researched ancestry
Got pale pigeon wings in the Fledging,
And so those became the standard of beauty,
Appearing on the covers of magazines,
Carefully highlighted
In the pale pink
Of a French manicure.

They went well
With pale porcelain skin
And blue eyes,
But not everyone's ancestors
Came from England
Or France or the Low Countries.

Ashanti women from Ghana fledged
With wings of red and green,
As vivid as the colors of the fabrics their ancestors had worn,
And the Maya grew wings with Yucatan-brilliant plumage
That set off their brown skin and black eyes beautifully.

But however odd - and wings were very odd to humans -
The colors were still dictated by their genes,
The hidden heritage
Of parents and grandparents and their parents,
Mothers to sons and fathers to daughters,
Ancestry made manifest in feathers.
Which made sense, when you thought about it,
But created some surprises too
Greater even than the growth of wings.

The descendants of the warrior-bards of Eire
Turned out to have the blue-black wings
Of the Morrigan's ravens,
Which suited them perfectly
But looked wildly out of place
On a descendent of English earls,
And the wide grey gull-wings
Of Vikings and Saxons
Raised a few eyebrows
In a village in the Syrian Desert,
Where clearly,
Some far-wandering crusaders
Had left more than their fortresses and bones.

But it was worst
(Or perhaps best)
When the bright jungle wings
Of Africa
Appeared on the lily-white descendents
Of New Orleans debutantes
Or the scarlet epaulettes
That adorn the wings
Of the blackbirds
In American marshes,
And more recently the descendants
Of Tecumseh’s people,
Showed up among city-folk
Whose family stories
Included the cowboys
But never the Indians.

That was the problem.
What had been hidden
Beneath the skin
And in the common red
Of human blood
Was hidden no longer,
And you looked pretty foolish
When you'd spent your life
Talking about how "those people"
Should just get over
What your ancestors
Did to theirs
When your plumage carried the colors
Of homelands
A long way from Europe.

So blue jay-wings
Jostled against
Garden sparrow and starling,
And robin and red-tailed hawk
Passed Eurasian eagle owl
And pale brown Egyptian goose
On the street,
And really it was only the models
Who never did look like real people
And the noble scions
Of France and England
And the Low Countries
Who had the pale, perfect
Wings of pigeons.

You need to think of a way to add something about the genetic heritage the Mongols left behind in Europe.
It seems there's been at least one camp found in France where wounded Mongol soldiers remained behind when the rest withdrew from Europe. They occasionally find white babies in this region which have the Mongol's dark sacral triangle on their bottoms so apparently they did leave children behind.

I enjoyed reading your poem!
I've told people tidbits of this stuff for years and most don't believe me!
:D