When the Birds Call

Before the sun arrives, they are already singing— a choir of small bones and hollow chambers rehearsing the day that hasn't come yet. The darkness holds them like cupped hands.

Then one breaks free, its wings a sharp disagreement with the ordinary world, and the others follow as if remembering something they never learned, a language written into feathers and throat.

They climb the air on invisible scaffolding, each note a small refusal of the night, and we who still sleep below them carry their songs into our deep dreams—

that persistence of flight, that fierce insistence on becoming, the way a voice survives in the body that releases it.