The Ones Who Knew How to Sing (a meditation in birdsong) #NaPoWriMo #24

Before the ink of language dried,
before the breath of meaning touched syllables,
they were already there—
on branches like living tuning forks,
plucking sky from silence,
filling the early hush with declarations
we would never quite decode.

They did not ask to be poets.
They simply opened their beaks
and out came the truth.

Listen—
you’ve heard it before.
That robin outside your window
at 5:42 a.m.,
who doesn’t care that you were crying
or hadn’t slept
or had promised yourself
you would not miss her this time.

Still he sings.
Not for you,
but not not for you.

In this tender indifference,
there is room to breathe.
To remember that grief, too,
has rhythm.
And healing might begin
when we stop naming everything.

You hear a lark,
somewhere between dreams and daylight.
It’s not melody,
it’s memory—
of someone who once said
that birds don’t need reasons to sing.

You envy them that.
You, the careful composer of apologies,
the one who polishes pain until it shines.
You, who sometimes cannot tell
if the sound in your chest
is your own heart or a cage.

But the birds?
They sing without story.
Without plot twists or post-credit scenes.
They do not need metaphors.
They are metaphors.
Wings held like questions.
Songs released like prayers.

And still, they are not holy.
Not untouchable.
They are ordinary miracles—
scruffy, erratic,
as likely to peck at trash
as to praise the dawn.

Even the crows—
those ink-dark skeptics of the sky—
are not immune to music.
Listen closely.
Their caws are choruses
for those of us
who walk with stones in our shoes
and fire in our bellies.

The city doesn’t pause for birdsong.
It rumbles and clatters and spills over itself.
Yet somehow,
the birds cut through—
slicing the smog with flute-bone precision.

A warbler weaves a thread
through steel and smoke.
A koel sings to the moon
without needing to see it.
The sun listens,
a little more golden
for their trouble.

You walk to the park
to forget your name for a while.
You sit on the bench
where no one waits for you.
Around you, pigeons argue,
sparrows whisper secrets
only the wind can keep.

You hear a sound
like something opening.
Maybe your own ribcage.
Maybe something more ancient—
the door to a world
that sings whether you listen or not.

And now you are listening.

Not for answers,
but for echoes.
Not for meaning,
but for the courage
to simply be.

Here, with the choir
of the uninvited
and the unafraid,
you finally understand—
they don’t sing because they’re free.

They sing,
despite the cage.

You’ll carry that truth back with you.
Tuck it beneath your tongue.
No songbook. No rules.
Just the wild possibility
of sound becoming solace.

And tomorrow,
when grief taps your shoulder again,
you may not rise with a song,
but you will remember—

how the ones who knew how to sing
never asked for silence
to begin.

#Birdsong #PoetryOfHealing #GriefAndGrace #NatureInspired #ListeningToBirds #HopeInSilence #WritersOfNature #PoeticMeditation #VoiceOfTheWild #TheOnesWhoKnewHowToSing