Baby Wrens’ Voices
I am a student of wrens.
When the mother bird returns
to her brood, beak squirming
with winged breakfast, a shrill
clamor rises like jingling
from tiny, high-pitched bells.
Who’d have guessed such a small
house contained so many voices?
The sound they make is the pure sound
of life’s hunger. Who hangs our house
in the world’s branches, and listens
when we sing from our hunger?
Because I love best those songs
that shake the house of the singer,
I am a student of wrens.
Copyright Credit: Poem copyright ©2005 by Thomas R. Smith, whose most recent book of poetry is Waking Before Dawn, Red Dragonfly Press, 2007. Poem reprinted from the chapbook Kinnickinnic, Parallel Press, 2008, by permission of Thomas R. Smith and the publisher. The poem first appeared in There is No Other Way to Speak, the 2005 “winter book” of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, ed., Bill Holm.