Bird Song

Stephanie Holden

At five a.m. the avian chorus starts

So fervently you’d think they had not heard

That men subdued the earth and killed the birds

(Too many hit the skyscrapers, etc.).

Now these descendants of the dinosaurs

(The last great owners of our pendant world),

Not having learned their present lowly place,

Sing out, while all is still, as if it were

Their species’ dawn.

Earth without bird song

Would seem some other world entirely—

As strange, without the frigid change, as Earth

In ice age, or its great primordial fires.

And yet today, so many spend their hours

In little worlds where birds aren’t heard at all,

As oblivious to their empty skies

As were the dinosaurs to their demise.

Published in Issue No. 10, Manus Aeternum, July 1st, 2025.

Stephanie Holden is an attorney living in the D.C. area; she has a B.A. in Humanities from Yale and a J.D. from Columbia. She is writing a novel.