A Springtime Serenade
In Honor of Birds, Part 2
[Reposting from March 2023]
In my last note, I told you about my son’s canary, which died last summer.
Without an in-house (or on-the-back-patio) bird this spring, I did not expect to be woken by bird song, but it happened this week. Not once but twice.
I was offered a sweet springtime serenade.
Even now as I sit on my living room couch, he trills outside my window.A mockingbird.
[And even now, as I work on reposting this in early March 2025, he is yet singing.]
A friend of mine recorded a bird song recently and played the tune for me. She was trying to figure out what bird it was; the tune sounded first like one bird and then like another. It had me stumped as well.
She sent the recording to her mom, who labeled it immediately.
“That's a mockingbird.”
They take a chirp here, a note there. They borrow bits from other birds and then string it all together, creating their own song.
In a college class, discussing literature, one of my professors said that if you borrow from one person and fail to attribute it, it's plagiarism; but borrow from a thousand and weave it together and it’s considered art.
I guess it’s what writers do. What limners do.
Read a thousand things, absorb a thousand experiences, hear a thousand songs.
Then let them settle and distill through a long season of cold, or during a dark seemingly endless night.
And then some morning, some spring, compose and weave an original, beautiful thing …
And let it emerge as song.
Keen insight. I do find the lyrics and phrasing of Mark Heard creeping into my verse from time to time. But he is no longer here to applaud or protest.