The Language of Birds

From sleep I am roused

by a code encrypted in the dawn:

The blackbird’s song is often woven

into the fabric of my dreams like orange thread,

but this morning I take hold of the world in stages;

rising slowly through startling cadences,

between bright-beaked, outlandish joy

and into the soft, curtained light

to lie listening, eyes half-closed, to the

Charlie Parker or Ella Fitzgerald of the blackbird world—

dazzling virtuosi make no allowances for the ignorance of their audience,

if indeed these soloists know they have one.

The blackbirds I remember from my youth

were inept, comb-and-paper buskers by comparison.

There are quieter calls, too:

rhythm-section birds laying down

a temporal foundation, anchoring

the soloists’ variations and exuberant bebop trills.

But the calls that continue to grip me

as they bray back from prehistory

—shocking me out of my complacency—

are the chimes, clicks, cackles and wheezes of the tui.

Enslaved by neither music nor logic,

they are like squeaking hinges opening my mind

to the possibility that I will always be a newcomer

and this will never be my home.

Woven together like a quilt of secrets,

it is hard to believe that the language of birds at dawn

does not conceal a deeper significance for human minds and bodies

than the shrill of an alarm clock.

Their intricate symphony of signals

might better prepare us for the day to come

if it were a cipher that could be cracked to reveal details

of a mission we do not remember ever accepting.

Instead, it is like a newsflash in the Welsh of Druids,

or an extreme weather warning in a lapsed dialect of Urdu.

This audio guide to safe havens might be a map directing us to fresh food;

or to a shade tree that is home to our most tuneful neighbours.

But it falls on ears that have forgotten how to translate tongues

from a Time before we discovered fire

when we had yet to learn how to walk upright

and articulate how strange it is to be alive.

—0O0—