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March 19, 2003 Back to Essays
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There's a mockingbird who has
recently taken up residence in a tree near my house. Each evening, well
after dark, he sings. He sings long, liquid mockingbird songs, filled with
short repeating phrases or longer verses that appear and vanish, then
reappear five or ten minutes later, as if the bird's score contained a
series of da capo or d.s. al fine instructions. He has become my
clock to judge when true evening has begun; it's time to get my daughter
into bed when the mockingbird sings.
I checked the web, and found that mockingbirds typically sing from February to August. So my mockingbird is singing simply because it is spring. Trees have budded into light green fingertips against the bright white-and-blue of a spring sky. The vacant fields that I pass while driving to work burgeon with yellow mustard and thigh-high grasses. The world has turned lemon yellow, lime green, yellow green, pink, white, with touches of reddish-purple from the flowering plum leaves. And each night the mockingbird sings. How urgently the world tries to grow. How strong the instinct to regenerate, to renew, to survive despite frost, drought, flood, pollution, or even the sidewalk thrown down over your roots. The grasses find the cracks and in spring begin anew the campaign to reclaim the ground. My country is dropping bombs on another country at this
moment, 11:43 pm on Wednesday, March 19, 2003. Tomorrow is the spring
solstice. I wonder if the grasses are green and burst through the sidewalk
cracks on the streets of Baghdad. I wonder if the trees there sprout
yellow green. I wonder if something like a mockingbird ever sits by the
window of Saddam Hussein, or of George W. Bush, and sings his spring song,
oblivious to everything but the pull of instinct and the tilting of the
world toward the sun. |