ZANESVILLE, Ohio — Editor's note: Video at the top of this story was originally published in a previous Nightbirde story from Aug. 9, 2021.
More than two months after leaving America’s Got Talent because her health had “taken a turn for the worse,” Jane Marczewski – a Zanesville woman who goes by the stage name Nightbirde – offered two updates on social media this week.
“If something so impossibly catastrophic and unimaginably awful can happen, then doesn’t that also mean something impossibly beautiful and impossibly redemptive can happen?” she tweeted Thursday with the hashtag #stillgotdreams.
On Instagram, she shared a powerful post titled “A Hero in Flames.”
If I were to die
It would be with the reflection of the mountains in my eyes
I would die with sun-pink cheeks
And a mouth full of blackberries
I want to die while my heart is still a greenhouse for hope
All my wild dreams as seedlings in egg cartons
Reaching toward the window
I cannot die yellow and hungry
I will not die in sterile air
But I would like to die
While the fireflies are still glowing
Morse coding their poetry for a cynical earth
I would like to die like Joan of Arc
With dignity and urgency and stubbornness
A watercolor portrait in the night
A sight to behold, a hero in flames
// A Hero in Flames, by Me.
Shortly after leaving AGT, Nightbirde launched a GoFundMe to help pay her medical bills. That fundraiser has since generated more than $646,000 as of 9:30 a.m. Friday. You can make a donation HERE.
“It pains me to ask again for money, but I ask as Moses did when he needed water, and he spoke to the rock; as the friend banging on his neighbor’s door asking for bread in the night,” according to her GoFundMe page. “Not because I am entitled to your help, but because I desperately need it.”
Nightbirde earned a Golden Buzzer from judge Simon Cowell when she first auditioned on AGT with an original song titled It's OK. It's a moment (watch below) that has now been viewed more than 35 million times on YouTube.
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