People often ask why I don’t run for President. I’d offer that I’m Auden’s Unknown Citizen, but it wouldn't help. Nobody reads poetry.
The Unknown Citizen- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More
I try to explain I’m not a Cardinal, everybody’s Mr. Wonderful, happy in the limelight
(which can give you skin cancer of the soul).
And I’m certainly not the even flashier, big and brassy Blue Jay, with his tedious crimes and misdemeanors.
Instead, I identify with Democrat birds, the darkk-eyed junco, for example, charcoal and cream, an unobtrusive, subtle guy who gobbles almost anything, from the feeder or the ground. Demanding some gilded platter would be presumptuous, would say he thinks he is somebody, wants to be the CEO. No, he's more an individual than sparrows are, but he's just folks.
If you really want to nail me, try the professor in a bowtie--I see a bowtie there, don't you? Old Nuthatch is convinced that his black head and bright white cheek are yin and yang; they distinguish him from flying chunks of gravel, highlight him as much as he cares to be singled out. Ditto the way he sometimes struts and bobs down the tree, more than a little lost, or merely absent-minded. Maybe it's a cry for attention, but it's not some gaudy celebration of self, as if he thinks he is somebody. He's still our kind of people. And in the right light, he’d argue, his back is a fetching kind of slate or downright blue, not dun grey. But it has to be the right light. And the right observer.
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