I’m sick of these darn birds
That keep on talking to me without words
Can’t understand a blessed thing
Though my ears ring and ring
With what I think they’re saying
With my notion of their meaning:
Give me food! Give me love!
They’re shooting at us again!
Enough of that preening!
But what I really shun
That decidedly takes away the fun
Is to admit the failure of interpretation
And here’s another minus – or is it a plus –
That it’s more or less the same with us
The streets, the air are so full of noise and song
Of our species’s failures, all the racial wrongs
Yet for what are we really praying?
What is it we are really saying?
I hear the words, I hear the strain
But forgive my little brain
Are we not the same species?
Must we not settle on the same theses
Like our mothers and fathers taught,
No matter how angry and how wrought?
We must use our words
Or we end up no wiser than the birds
Unless of course being birds is not so bad
Yet I think chattering without wings a little sad.