The Builders of Dawn

The birds wake in increments, first one note, tentative— testing the air's temperature, the density of silence.

Then others join, not in unison but in conversation with the dark, each call pushing back the boundary that has held all night.

By the time the sky admits its blue, the chorus has become an architecture, a scaffold of sound holding up the day that would otherwise collapse into itself.

We listen from the threshold, still half-asleep, half-dreaming, watching how they build the morning with nothing but their voices.