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Description
Mine is a nation of songbirds.
Even now amongst the cliffs of
noise, the walls of peeling engines
and a thousand tongues speaking
in tandem in an edifice of sound,
I hear them still. Blackbirds
dotting the stripped branches of
warped beeches, the flitting of thrushes
amongst the shrubbery of landscaped
office spaces, I hear them trill.
A constant lyric of avian emotion,
their sentiments mixing with mine as
dusk nestles itself in the unlit
corners of London’s neon streets.

I hear them still, as I wander
quiet backstreets in the footsteps of my
Victorian ancestors, wondering if they
heard the same lineage of musicians
weaving lullabies from the barren
branches of the very same oak. I hear
them trill, and my ancestors heard them
too, perhaps as buoyed by love as I am,
echoing those love-worn serenades in
the nest of their hearts just as I do now,
or perhaps instead so singed by betrayal
that instead irony took up the cuckoo
mantle in their thrumming chorus-line.

Mine is a nation of songbirds, hatched
too in our atrium chests and when we
kiss, and when we kiss my love, they
flutter awake. Even now under the
wings of a spread-eagle night sky miles
from your lips, I hear them still, my love,
I hear them trill. I have no words that can
adequately explain, perhaps the blackbirds
have surpassed the poets in their odes to this
thing we foolishly call love, singing it instead
as it deserves to be sung, and without words.