Birdsong - June 22 2024

 

Birdsong

June 22 2024

Lately, I’ve been awakening

well before dawn.

Some days, I’m unable to sleep at all,

and sit in the silence

of a world at rest

as the sky begins to soften.

Too gradually

to actually see.

Until I notice

that the shadows have slurred

trees sharpened,

and only the brightest stars persist.

When it will still be some time

before the horizon even takes shape.

Yet songbirds

are already calling out

in the predawn murk.

Insistent trills

as if competing to be heard,

short repeated refrains

like clockwork

that carry through the woods.

Either born knowing,

or learned

while listening through the shell.

Early birds,

who, on the longest day of the year

can't wait for the sun,

greedy for even more

in our short precarious summers.

While I have confused my days and nights,

corrupted

by artificial light,

drawb blinds,

the impervious brick

that walls me in.

I may resent

how their cacophony

disturbs the morning calm,

but also envy the purity

of their industrious lives,

the birds

living as nature intended

and their kind have always done.

Up with the sun

and asleep with it.

Like the tides.

Like the earth’s rotation

from day to day.

And like its precession

as the seasons change

and it steadily circles the sun,

they are creatures of light

in sync with the universe.