I started this sonnet in 1998, saw it published in the online zine Cyclamens & Swords last August, and have just dallied with edits and played with line breaks, for here. I don’t know what breed of bird it was, but I’ll never forget that morning serenade.

I heard a bird whose song was like a bell
of silver,
like a ringing glockenspiel,
like water falling on itself.
I tell of it for beauty’s sake,
again to feel that lightness in my ears.
The creature sang,
it seemed to me,
of liberty and spring.
Upon a wire overhead
he rang the world awake.
He took in every thing.

Ingenious people,
we reduce our view with our inventions,
while the days are tolled by birds.
Our windshields frame our sight;
our thoughts are bound in plasma screens.
The pixels skew and limit us.
The tempered glass is cold.
A song explodes the strictures we have wrought.