Jun 2018
How you always wake me up early in the morning
Standing on the roof of my house while the house sparrows
Chatter among themselves in their sweet frenzied way
Arguing over food, and space and all the other things that
Siblings squabble over
They flutter around and you pay no attention to them
But like Zarathustra on his hillside, you continue to call out
And demand answers with that strange rising intonation at the end
A rising arpeggio of riddles asking of me in the morning-
Who-who, who-who, who?
Standing on the roof of my house while the house sparrows
Chatter among themselves in their sweet frenzied way
Arguing over food, and space and all the other things that
Siblings squabble over
They flutter around and you pay no attention to them
But like Zarathustra on his hillside, you continue to call out
And demand answers with that strange rising intonation at the end
A rising arpeggio of riddles asking of me in the morning-
Who-who, who-who, who?
Inspired by a segment of the BBC program called Springwatch in which the hosts spoke about birds in poetry and the need to feature birds like house sparrows and wood pigeons in more poems. The poet writes about a wood pigeon that keeps waking him up early in the morning and how it always sounds like it is asking him a deep philosophical question.
