Poem inspired by my life story.
Green Destiny
Between wires and sky
fell your emerald flight.
You broke eggs in my cradle,
planted trees in my soul.
Twelve years apart,
a shoulder that remembers you.
Broken feathers that taught
the true meaning of freedom.
@carolinalmar
WOVEN FEATHERS, ETERNAL SPIRITS, GREEN DESTINY
The elders of Antioquia say that, in the southern mountains, where sunrises paint the hillsides gold and afternoons embrace the valleys with purple shadows, there lived a royal Amazon parrot whose destiny was mysteriously intertwined with that of a girl not yet born.
In those days, when the city began to stretch its cement fingers toward territories once ruled only by trees and wind, this emerald-feathered parrot with golden spots on its face flew through the skies like a guardian of the heights. Every morning, an elderly couple waited for him on the balcony of their urban home. The grandmother, with worn brushes between her fingers, captured his flight on cloths that would later become tablecloths and curtains. The grandfather, with hands trembling from age, scattered seeds in the yard, as one leaves small treasures for a friend never touched.
Not far from there, on a farm surrounded by mountains, the couple’s daughter awaited the birth of her first daughter, while her husband worked the land with the wisdom inherited from generations.
One day, when the sun was at its peak, the unthinkable happened. Urban expansion had woven an invisible web of wires across the sky. Distracted by a glint, the parrot did not see the modern trap until it was too late. His wings became entangled in that metallic web and, like a green star, he plummeted toward the elderly couple’s yard. The impact was dry, like the sound of a broken promise.
“He’s fallen! The parrot has fallen!” cried the old woman, dropping her brushes.
The grandfather ran like he hadn’t in decades. There was the magnificent bird, with one wing bent at an impossible angle and a leg that no longer responded to his will. They picked him up with the gentleness one uses to gather a dream, wrapped him in a cloth embroidered with birds and plants, and called their son-in-law.
“You must take him with you,” said the old man with a broken voice. “In the city, he will die. In your land, even wounded, he will have a chance.”
The man, son of farmers and now husband to a woman about to give birth, took the parrot in his calloused hands. Upon returning to his mountain home, he feared his wife would reject the injured bird he brought with him.
“It’s a gift of love,” he said as he introduced the wounded parrot. “A fallen guardian who now needs our care.”
The woman, her belly round and her eyes filled with compassion, accepted the unexpected visitor. What no one knew then was that this encounter between the parrot and the family would forever change the course of their lives.
The rural grandparents, parents of the man, looked at the bird with knowing eyes and said: “Don’t name him. He’s not a pet. He’s a free being who now needs to heal.”
Thus began a passionate discussion between the grandparents about which trees would best support the parrot’s recovery. The grandfather insisted on planting guava trees; the grandmother defended the orange trees.
“Parrots need sweet fruits!” he argued.
“They need variety and color!” she replied.
In the end, the dispute had an unexpected winner: the land itself. The elders, in their eagerness to please the parrot, ended up planting dozens of native fruit trees: guavas, oranges, mangoes, avocados, and many others whose seeds they kept like treasures from ancestral times. Without knowing it, they were creating a living sanctuary that would endure for generations, an arboreal legacy that half a century later would still offer shade and nourishment.
Meanwhile, the parrot began to heal. His wing improved over time, though he would never fly with the same height and grace again. His leg remained slightly twisted, giving him a peculiar walk the family learned to recognize by the sound of his steps on the wooden rooftops.
The turning point came one early morning in February, when the sky was still dark and the house was asleep. The pregnant woman awoke with the first pains: labor had come early. The man, panicking at being so far from town and the hospital, ran to wake his parents.
Then the extraordinary happened: the parrot, as if he understood the gravity of the moment, began to emit a sound no one had ever heard before. It wasn’t a squawk or a song: it was almost a call, a signal that echoed through the valley.
Half an hour later, a midwife casually passing by the nearby road heard that unusual call and, guided by an instinct she couldn’t explain, approached the farm. Her arrival was providential: the birth was complicated, the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck. Without the midwife’s intervention, neither the mother nor little Carolina would have survived.
“It was the parrot who brought her,” the grandmother would say years later. “He was her guardian even before she was born.”
The first two years of Carolina’s life unfolded in a strange dance with that feathered being who was never named. The parrot roamed freely around the farm, came and went from the house at will, stole eggs from the kitchen and, to everyone’s dismay, developed a fascination with the little girl.
He would sneak into the room when the adults weren’t looking. Once inside, he’d peck at the blanket until Carolina was exposed. The strangest thing was that he would take the stolen eggs and break them over the baby’s body, as if performing some ritual incomprehensible to humans.
This behavior, though fascinating, began to worry the family. The rural grandmother, after observing for months, finally confronted her daughter-in-law with an impossible question: “The child or the parrot? One of them must go.”
The decision was painful but clear: Carolina could not be raised in those conditions. However, the dilemma now was what to do with the parrot. Back then, nearly three decades ago, there were no bird sanctuaries or wildlife rescue organizations accessible to a peasant family.
To everyone’s surprise, two days before the scheduled date to move the parrot, the bird disappeared. The entire family searched desperately throughout the farm, checking trees, rooftops, and corners, fearing a predator had gotten him or that he had left by instinct, sensing the impending change.
“The parrot is gone!” cried Carolina’s mother, with a mix of guilt and relief for not having to face a painful farewell.
But on the third day of searching, the unexpected happened. The grandfather dusted off an old blue hammock, passed down through generations, to distract himself from the sadness. As he stretched it between two guava trees, he heard a soft cooing. There, curled in the folds of the fabric, was the parrot, nestled as if he had found a temporary nest.
“He was waiting for the right moment,” the grandfather would later tell Carolina. “That hammock, which is now yours, was his last refuge with us.”
After that discovery, they found a farmer from a distant village who agreed to take the parrot in. On the day of farewell, the bird seemed to understand what was happening. He didn’t try to escape when placed in a perforated box for the journey; he only let out a soft sound, almost like a sigh, that made Carolina’s mother cry.
“If I could go back in time,” my mother told me years later, “I would have built him a separate shelter, I would have sought veterinary help for his injured leg, I would have found another solution. But back then, we just did what we thought was best.”
Life went on. Carolina grew up surrounded by the fruit trees her great-grandparents had planted for the parrot. The bird’s story became a family legend, told at gatherings and celebrations, always with a touch of nostalgia and guilt.
Twelve years later, Carolina—now a curious teenager and a lover of nature—was walking with her grandfather along paths far from the farm. It was a routine they both enjoyed: going out at dawn, watching the mountains awaken, visiting the cows in the neighboring pastures.
On one of those walks, they approached a farmhouse Carolina had never visited. Suddenly, a green flash caught her attention. Among the nearby trees, a parrot with emerald feathers and golden markings on its face fluttered with a slightly unbalanced flight. Something in the bird’s gaze froze the girl.
Time seemed to stop when their eyes met. The parrot, as if driven by a memory deeper than time itself, flew straight toward her and perched on her shoulder. Carolina, who had no conscious memory of her childhood companion, nonetheless felt an immediate and inexplicable connection.
“Oh, the parrot!” her grandfather exclaimed, his voice breaking with emotion.
They sat under a tree, sharing some blackberry popsicles they had brought along, while the grandfather told the full story: how the parrot had been the first to welcome her into the world, how it had mysteriously called the midwife who saved her life, how it had performed those strange rituals with the eggs that now, seen through the wisdom of years, seemed like an attempt to protect her in his own way.
“Do you know why he broke the eggs over you?” her grandfather reflected. “The old farmer who took him in explained it to me years later. In the wild, some adult birds feed their chicks by regurgitating food onto them. He was identifying you as his chick—he was adopting you.”
Tears rolled down Carolina’s cheeks. The parrot, still perched on her shoulder, gently brought its beak to her face, almost as if to wipe away one of those tears.
“He was never caged,” the grandfather continued. “The farmer respected our only condition: that he could fly free. Without knowing it, we gave him the best life possible.”
That reunion transformed Carolina. She realized that the fruit trees surrounding her home were not just trees: they were a living legacy, an act of love from her great-grandparents toward a being they considered worthy of respect, even if he wasn’t human.
She also understood that sometimes, to love means to let go. Her parents and grandparents had loved the parrot enough to give up his company when they realized they couldn’t offer him what he needed.
Today, decades later, Carolina has become a science communicator and artist dedicated to conservation. Every time she paints a mural, every time she writes about the importance of protecting native species, she remembers that nameless parrot who connected four generations of her family and forever transformed her relationship with nature.
The fruit trees still stand, larger and lusher than ever, and although the Amazonian royal parrot likely no longer soars over the Antioquian mountains, his spirit lives on in every bird Carolina watches fly free, in every stroke of her brush, in every word she writes defending every being’s right to fly free.
Because, as her grandfather taught her that day of the reunion, while they savored blackberry popsicles under the generous shade of a tree: “Parrots, like true love, belong to no one. They only visit our lives to remind us that genuine connection transcends time, distance, and even the differences between species.”
As @carolinalmar, I wish to be part of Fundación Loros to learn more about these wonderful birds and contribute to their conservation. My dream is to create murals that tell the stories of these extraordinary beings and raise awareness about the importance of their freedom. In addition to this, I want to use my platform as a science communicator and my broad audience to inspire and connect with this and other stories in support of conservation, recovery, and efforts to preserve these powerful birds. This experience would not only allow me to close a personal circle, but also to use my art and communication as tools to protect those who, like that nameless parrot, deserve to soar the skies.