A Very Last Song

A Very Last Song is a performance installation by Reza Mirabi, born from a 1997 field recording: the final bird of its kind—a male ʻōʻō—singing a love song that will never be answered.

Inspired by the 12th-Century poem منطق-الطیر Language of the Birds, as well as by Mandy and Lara Sirdah, two bird-watching sisters in Gaza, and Nadeem Shehzad, New Delhi’s bird doctor who’s saved over 22,000 birds. The piece journeys through seven valleys of care, collapse, and the Simurgh: the mythical bird who has seen the world created and destroyed countless times, holding the wisdom of all the ages.

We live in times of collapse—individual, cultural, planetary. And while we organize, protest, and grieve, we also sing. We cry out to a beloved universe whose turnings too often overwhelm and wound us—yet whose mystery we remain intimately connected to. Singing in this way isn’t escape—it’s devotion. A way to metabolize the unbearable, the unknowable, to honor a paradoxical world with practices that match its intensity.

At its core, A Very Last Song asks: What if birds are messengers of the unsayable? What if their songs are invitations—to remember, to feel, to reimagine our kinship with each other and our damaged, beloved Earth?