An April shower turns into a downpour just as I come out onto the porch. I look up from my book sometime later and realize that it’s stopped. The sky brightens. A towhee and a song sparrow trade riffs.
song sparrow
Cold and still. Sunlit stripes brighten between the trees as the songbird chorus dwindles to one energetic song sparrow in a spicebush next to the springhouse.
Sunrise sung in by song sparrows. I peer at red clouds through a fence of dripping icicles from yesterday’s snow.
An inch or two of wet snow sticks to everything, and it’s still coming down, bringing the kind of wonderland I’d wondered whether we’d see at all this winter. A song sparrow sings his spring song.
Cold and still. A sky etched with faintly pink contrails. The song sparrows sing in fragments, while the white-throated sparrows merely chirp.
Overcast at sunrise, the clouds begin to show cracks of blue. A song sparrow continues with his hip-hip-hurrahing long after the others have gone off to forage.
Another crystal-clear dawn. A song sparrow and a Carolina wren are trading licks, following initial solos from a robin and a cardinal, all over the whine of traffic.
Windy, cold and clear at dawn. A song sparrow pipes up from the depths of the lilac. The ridge turns red.
In the frosty stillness, I watch moonlight disappear into dawnlight. Half an hour before sunrise, an acorn falls with a thud and all the sparrows begin twittering.
Dawn light with sparrow song. The full moon of my insomnia still glows above the western ridge as blood dries on the mousetrap under the stairs.
Night and day overlap as the moon rises through the trees, serenaded by a family of barred owls, while the first song sparrow and cardinal herald the dawn. Then the whip-poor-will begins to shriek.
Out before dawn, I find moonlight in my chair. A song sparrow sings one phrase, possibly without waking up. A quiet trickle from the spring.
Mid-morning with the sun full in my face, listening to the roof drip onto the roof. A chickadee sings his spring song, and a little later, so does the song sparrow.
A song sparrow singing at first light as if it were March already. A quiet trickle from the spring. The moon gapes through the treetops, pale and hollowed out.