Day Twenty Three- NaPoWriMo-Koel’s Call

NaPoWriMo: Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that focuses on birdsong. Need examples? Try A.E. Stallings’ “Blackbird Etude,” or for an old-school throwback, Shelley’s “To a Skylark.”

Day Twenty Three- NaPoWriMo-Koel’s Call

Art: Chinese School - Koel from Drawings of Birds from Malacca c1805- 18

Every morning, I close my eyes

to listen—
to listen to that birdsong

miles away from my homeland,
from that mango tree
from that once-flourishing garden
where dreams hung on lush threads.
The sky is bluer and the grass greener
There—

koel’s cuhoo cuhoo echoing
through the air.
Mesmerized, I pause—
to breathe—
inhale its palpable song
inhale its saccharine sweetness
inhale its inky blackness—

as if its imprint will give me a voice
to sing my song to freedom.

Coincidentally, two days back in the afternoon, I was speaking to my mother over the phone, and I could hear the Koel’s song in the backdrop—it drew me in. It always does. I live far from home, and the simple bird song brought me an entire world of feelings. It was as if the Koel became a bridge between my mother and me, between the present and the past, between where I was and where my heart longs to be.