(J. Drew Lanham)J. Drew Lanham is a poet. He’s also an academic, a creative writer, a curator and an ornithologist. That’s someone who studies birds.He talked with Race Unwrapped Host and producer Michelle Tyrene Johnson about how nature, poetry and race fly together.It’s part of Race Unwrappe d Season 5’s focus on art and protest.This excerpt of the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Michelle Tyrene Johnson: So, how does being a lover of birds feed into your love of poetry?J. Drew Lanham: It's really hard to look at a bird and not be inspired. To see a bird in flight, to watch a swallowtail kite soaring, or watch a bobwhite quail flush from the thicket in front of you, or to hear a warbler sing after making a migration across the Gulf of Mexico. That puts me in a spell, and, in a way, gives me license to create. In a way that hardly any other being does. I mean love does that for you, right? It puts you in the sense of rhythm, of syncopation, of just a sort of feeling that there's no other way to describe it but poetic.MTJ: That was so beautiful what you just said. So, on the note of what this season is about, what does social justice mean to you?JDL: Social justice means that a community gathers, flocks, in a way, just as birds do, we murmurate around an issue. We swirl and we turn, and we come together in a way to demand rights that are due us, that aren't extraordinary by any means, and in many ways, it's demanding your just due as a human being. And that we have to come together to do that means that there is force in those numbers. It's just like we might see one black bird and think something of it, but then when we see those same birds murmurating, flocking together, there's power there. So social justice to me imbues a sense of not just togetherness but shared plight. That part of what's been visited upon you is this storm of injustice, whether it be by race, whether it be by sex, whether it be by gender orientation, any of those things that brings you to a point where you have to gather to demand with unified voice and movement that you will have better, that you must have better, and that's what it means to me. It's us gathering to find justice.MTJ: You kind of sort of hit on it in what you just said, but I'm still going to ask you this: What can we learn from nature about how to be better as human beings to one another?JDL: Every day I go out and I watch all of these birds. I watch all of this wildness, and it's one of the few places that I find what I call true peace. And when I say true peace, that I'm not having to look over my shoulder. I'm not having to wonder who's profiling me.Nature humbles you in a way to think about yourself as part of something greater, rather than just thinking about separating this being out or that being out, so that you can practice some discriminatory efforts. Now we know that happens, right? We know that there are certain animals, certain birds especially, and they happen to be black birds that are discriminated against, and we don't quite talk about that enough.I talk about starlings a lot. European starlings are birds that were brought here in the late 1800s by an acclimatization society because they wanted all of Shakespeare's birds in North America, and so they brought these birds over. This guy brought these birds over and released them in Central Park, which is already a problematic space, right? Because it was created by displacing primarily Black communities, but those starlings got here.Starlings are extraordinarily and extraordinarily intelligent. They're extraordinarily resourceful, and people will worship them from afar. They'll watch them on a field of play, doing that murmurating. But then they're not protected, and they're reviled. And people will even kill them up close. I say it's the bird that you like watching from afar, but you don't want to come to dinner ...read more read less