Birdtalk

In morning's twilight, a lone,
brave black squirrel zigzag-
hopscotches fastidiously---
cautiously,
with sundry stops to look
and, head cocking into immobility,
focus-listen---
across the backyard's plattes Land
broad-open spaces deckward.

Tree branch-perching birds,
with over-the-edge energy/stamina,
sing, warble, cinguettio, phweet,
peep, tweet, trill, zirpen, phwee,
hoo, chirrup, cheep, and coo
in competing bids for attention.

One contrastingly hoarse-scratchy
crow's smoker's krah! from lofty
vantage irregularly crosscuts
the surrounding generic-birdsong
mishmashing medley symphonia of
amazing aural intricacy,
temporarily perverting the totality
of noise into a Mother Nature's
musica ficta.

I watch-listen in brimful astonishment,
momentarily rewarded for being
the early-rising barbsdad that I am.

If I were a bird that gave a hoot
(cheep-cheep!),
I'd be bridling in aggrieved high
dudgeon over the anemically pale
phweet, peep, tweet, phwee, hoo,
cheep, and coo language that so
obviously intends to suggest the way
I birdspeak.

Not to mention even greater
monstrosities, like, for example,
the horrid humanspeak of quack-quack,
cluck-cluck, cock-a-doodle-do,
and gobble-gobble.

(And that's just birds.

People likewise oversimplify other
crittertalk, like the classically
careless---
and eminently disrespectful---
moo-moo or oink-oink, for a couple
of ear-cringing examples.)

Humans, esp. English-language humans---
or perhaps more fairly limited to
American-language humans---
in their translation from bird-
to humantalk lose meaning, accent,
tone, complexity, tonality, volume,
energy, variability, depth, musicality,
theatricality, a kind of rapperality,
and an uncountable host of other
ingredients that make up the melodious
tunes so masterfully rendered by most
of our feathered sojourners.

It's a rare person who can pull off
a deceptively accurate (to an untrained
ear) single-note avian interjection;
and the rarest jewel of a human being
is one who can sing a few bars sounding
like a particular bird warbling
a particular, untitled bird's ditty.

I guess our lazy language (lamentably)
has its use; being symbolic ---

See, that's the rub! Most of us give
it no thought, blithely assuming---
wrongly, of course---
that our cheep-cheep verbalizations
portray, albeit poorly, birdsound.

They don't.

Our words are symbolic, representing
speech of a different kind than what
surrounds the natural words themselves;
and they are not imitative like they
pretend to be.

I'll start my pre-interrupted sentence
anew so its thread won't be lost:

I guess our lazy language (lamentably)
has its use; being symbolic, it saves
us time and energy.

And we don't have to figure out how
to birdspeak.

Our loss.

My loss.

Your loss.

Everybody's loss-loss.