Reader Submissions

BIRDS

by

Nina Woodrow

is it because the humans

are sheltering at home is it due to this pause

in the perpetual peak hour clamour the halfway fade

in the workaday industrial rumble

that bird conversations

are suddenly more audible?

all across the city the orchestra

of birdsong sounded out this morning

in call and response from river verges

and backyard green havens, refrains and rejoinders,

trills and chirps and caws and whistles surely this concert

is more sonically robust these days?

do they exist in another dimension

these flighty messengers alighting in jittery hops

flicking off branches in a flash of micro dinosaur agility?

is their frequency normally just drowned out

by the pitch, the feedback squeal

caused by too much city noise?

or am I only just now finally

slowing enough to notice the daily ritual

of our local avian place makers hear them practice

their mobile surveys that map the morning terrain in sound

each call connecting one to the other so by mid-morning

they have the territory covered?

and way way up high

against the blue screen of an autumn sky

flocks of birds are airborne, undulating

like emblems decorating an invisible sheet

waving in the breeze

on an astral washing line