You called me into the
bedroom to see something
really special
you said
And on the windowsill
I saw
One large lustrous green parrot–
I thought
They don’t sit on
windowsills
around here
In fact
They don’t fly
around Brooklyn at all–
I had never seen such
beauty so close–
My fingers shook
as I struggled to
take a picture
and so
in that instant
He flew away
but came back again
with four of his
brothers and sisters
and as a team
as one family
they gathered up
their soft green wings
and quickly
disappeared into
the early Brooklyn morning–
nightshiftsister 
Did the parrots have red rings around their necks? And red beaks?
Honestly I don’t remember! I will see them again though… Why are you asking? Does it mean something ?
When I was ten years old I fell in love with a pair of love birds and my mother gave me an Indian Ring Neck Parakeet for Christmas instead. It died Christmas day, so my mother got a replacement from the pet store and I named him Sam The Second but he never learned a word and I had to sell him to the girl across the street when it became too difficult to smuggle him back and forth across the Canadian border. I have titled my book I wrote in 1996 “So Long Sam” about an unyielding attachment I developed to a little doctor when my mother died in 1993.
Wow. That’s beautiful. My grandmother had birds (and we’ve had birds our whole lives) so it was fitting that we saw them by our window. We also saw a cardinal a week leading up to my grandmother’s death and I was reading they are messengers that someone will die.
I believe in the significance of birds too — in 1993 my first husband and I were visited by a chickadee while he and I were building my mother’s coffin. The little chickadee landed on my finger and on the coffin boards and eye-balled the boards as he walked along, whereupon Peter declared, “That’s your mother — ” and a spell was cast I’ve been under ever since.
Beautiful. I am glad you understand the significance of birds ! They are messengers for sure!