They come and go like coloured birds migrating
with maps of other countries in their brain.
You are a tree in which they pause, awaiting
an inner signal to set off again.
You stop, you listen, straining to decipher
the simultaneous songs that they intone,
knowing that so many men would die for
the chance to hear just one of them alone.
Summated, though, their singing’s but a jangle
of jarring chords and rampant dissonance,
the chaos that’s passed on from age to age.
And in a daze you dare to disentangle
a single thread of perfect eloquence
and tease it free and lay it on the page.