i wake before the light
because the light is late
and i have things to say

all night the branch held me
thin as a thought
but morning

morning splits

green everywhere
green pushing through wood
through soil
through memory

i shake myself loose
feathers crackle
the sky opens

and i cannot hold it

i sing

trill-trill-trill
see-see-see
bright-bright-bright

i throw my throat into the air

here i am
here i am
here i am

the worms wriggle
the puddles flash
the sun leans closer

and i sing again

not pretty
not polite

loud
sharp
spilling

tree-to-tree
roof-to-roof
sky-to-sky

i slice the blue and shout through it

spring!
spring!
spring!

the branches answer in leaf
the grass answers in green
the air answers by lifting me

everywhere something is trying
grass trying
insects trying
the sun trying

and i join the trying

wingbeat
wingbeat
wingbeat

my heart hammers
hammer-hammer
faster

joy rising in my throat
too big
too bright

i pour it out

chirrup
whistle
cry

again

again

again

yesterday the world was bone

today

today

it breaks into bloom

and i am not quiet about it

i am noise
i am feather
i am breath on fire

i survived the cold

and now

now

i get to sing

and fly

and sing

and fly

and sing

again

author’s note

on walks during april mornings, you start to hear them. rowdy songbirds, completely unbothered by your plans, yelling as if silence has personally offended them. they interrupt your calls. they do not lower their voices or wait their turn. this is a declaration, not a performance.

they are small. i still can’t identify them, despite owning two field guides i have never opened past the introduction. they are loud. startlingly, almost confrontationally loud. they sing like quiet is unacceptable.

most small songbirds live two to five years. their hearts beat somewhere between three hundred and five hundred times per minute, which is an unreasonable amount of effort just to stay alive, and yet they manage it while also flying, singing, and looking perpetually startled. if you or i operated at that metabolic rate, we would need to eat roughly our body weight in food each day, which, now that i think about it, i may have attempted during certain winters.

the bird does not know any of this. it only knows that the air is warm and the throat is full.

i wanted to write from inside that. no perspective, no wisdom. just the body doing what sixty million years of evolution built it to do.

somewhere in there i thought about jonathan livingston seagull flying for the stupid glory of flying, nelly furtado’s i’m like a bird refusing to stay in one place, and rahman’s phir se us chala, which does in four minutes what most therapy does in four years.