The blackbird sings
my day into existence
At one moment operatic,
then comic, then conversational,
Sounds he may have overheard and
recorded in the feathered scrapbook of
his blue-black head,
Lilting, punctuated by trills and hymn-like
crystal sharp chords.
He is its author, director and
conductor of the orchestra of dawn.
I don’t write these poems;
it is the rain that types at a
Hundred and twenty words a minute,
with furious fingers upon my bedroom
on sleepless nights.
It is the brown heat of summer,
The black trees seen against a sky
in the yellow apple-sweet morning.
The green wind that ripples the seas
of wheat and barley,
Vast corn-silk oceans that stretch
all the way back to my childhood.
It is your perfect thighs that I can’t
gaze upon them for fear of going blind,
It is the moon where the
stolen voices of owls were hidden by
Some goddess in
the springtime of the world.
It is the wind chimes in the garden
it is the secret names of cats,
it is the boundless joy of dogs;
it is the starving child
And the blind woman and the poor
and the voiceless that write
these bastard songs:
these orphan lyrics.
The blackbird sings my day into being.
A day so strange and full of
love and sadness and
frustrated desires that worry the
tender flesh beneath my clothes,
that dry like sweat on my body.
Because, what does a blackbird know
of the terrible needs of man?
Bill Lewis
Picture Nick Victor