He sings one evening in late June from atop a tree in the village centre of Montagnola, a few wingbeats away from the former home and museum of Nobel prize winning German poet, author, nature lover and painter Hermann Hesse.
The blackbird’s voice is one of clear trills and triumph, of watery music and melody. He sings boldly and beautifully as if there is no such thing as climate change, ocean acidification, deforestation, the sixth mass extinction, plastic contamination. He sings and I feel forgiven. Though not the first bird of the famous hymn, he certainly sings as blackbirds have sung for thousands of years. He sings and time is torn away, for it is almost an identical song to the blackbirds of my childhood: those boisterous, proud singers from atop trees where Epsom Common woods fringed a few brief meadows ringed with roads. Every morning and evening, a blackbird sang. One in particular sits conducted into my memory. On the far corner of Braken Path road there was a tall conifer tree, the stage for one especially trembling blackbird. From this perch he broke mornings and molded evenings; his singing was the herald of the day, permission for all other birds to begin. I could hear him as I crossed the meadow to my friend’s house and as we set off on exploratory woodland walks. Always heard long before he was seen, but he could be spotted: a black prophet of happiness with a sunshine yellow bill. He has become a mythical bird who sang all the notes of my endlessly short boyhood summers when there was no future, no fear, no causes for alarm, just time to plan the morning’s adventures. No adulthood, no time passing, no loss. I can still hear him singing, and it’s his genetic cousins that sing here in Montagnola, Switzerland. A slight variation in notes here and there, a more operatic range, perhaps, as suits this region. But he sings and I am reminded, and then I realize how much time has passed with the fracturing mornings and evenings of middle age. I wonder how much time we have left to listen to his songs.
1 Comment
Stephanie Cassidy
7/11/2019 11:03:06 am
very elegiac, quietly melancholy. birds, indeed all of nature, only know the decline of their world through the limitations imposed on them through the loss of their habitat. if only we could learn from them....
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AuthorA poetic-essay style blog with a limit of 365 words. 365 like the days of the year - my name being one of those days! Archives
March 2020
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