Bird Song
At five a.m. the avian chorus starts
So fervently you’d think they had not heard
That men subdued the earth and killed the birds
(Too many hit the skyscrapers, etc.).
Now these descendants of the dinosaurs
(The last great owners of our pendant world),
Not having learned their present lowly place,
Sing out, while all is still, as if it were
Their species’ dawn.
Their species’ dawn. Earth without bird song
Would seem some other world entirely—
As strange, without the frigid change, as Earth
In ice age, or its great primordial fires.
And yet today, so many spend their hours
In little worlds where birds aren’t heard at all,
As oblivious to their empty skies
As were the dinosaurs to their demise.
Stephanie Holden is an attorney living in the D.C. area.
I’m reading this while listening to the birds that have nested outside my classroom window.
Unfortunately, birds are not the only creatures humans have on the back foot. We downplay and turn a blind eye to the demise of those plants and animals we share the planet with, at our peril.
Thanks for raising awareness to the dangers facing Earth’s dwindling biodiversity with your poem.
Your poem speaks to my heart. It would be a sad
day, indeed without birds. They are already setting
off alarms with their unusual behavior.
Many involved heavily in the electronics age would never understand Thoreau and Emerson.
You make a strong point, Stephanie.
When we’d celebrate the Summer Solstice by staying up all night in a tree fort to welcome the dawn, we concluded that it was Mosquitoes that provoked the dawn chorus.
Very nice, Stephanie. At times it seems our contentious world should be allowed to just sit outside and listen to nature and reflect upon its importance.
I like this poem. I do feel sorry for those unfortunate, cubicled souls.
It does make me think about the birds that my wife, Susan, and I capture in photos and memories. Unlike humans, there are thousands of species of birds with hundreds of billions of individuals. Humans, according to science, are the last species of the ten or twenty preexisting species. We exist in far smaller numbers… less than ten billion. It seems we, in our cubicles, are far more endangered than they.
Perhaps we should fly from our cubicles, ignore those who would direct our every activity and thought, and sing to the heavens in glorious freedom as birds do.
Birdsong is for the birds. How fortunate it is for us that they are willing to share it.