Psalm 90; ("Teach us to number our days that we may grow in wisdom.")

A lone songbird wakes me on this last day of April.
The darkest before dawn is also the quietest.
As I walk to the train, through neighborhood after neighborhood,
this bird’s song is taken over by another, and then another,
in what is less of a relay than a recognition of boundaries,
the way church bells marked parish borders in more parochial times.
(So I came to be baptized at St. Adalbert’s,
fifty-seven years ago:
because its bells echoed through our house
in the hours before dawn, that late April.)

With the sun, and over the songs of other birds,
I hear dad back home, singing while he makes the morning coffee, whistling to me when he’s done.

The pace picks up in the city:
over the morning’s drone of automobile and people,
mom is playing the piano.
She has dug out the old sheet music from the bench,
and her hands glide across the upright of her childhood.
On the piano are fresh picked lilies-of-the-valley.

The afternoon rush comes fast
and old friends, not seen in years, call out my name,
inviting me to join their happy-hour:
laughter and name-calling, the out-shouting and the shot-downing, all to the background of pinball and jukebox.


But then the moon puts the “dim” in “diminuendo”.

The lamp on the dresser softens my room.
The song of a young woman,
rising and falling like the ribbons I used to buy her,
accompanies me through the night,
only to be awakened by a lone songbird,
welcoming me to a rainy first of May:
a new month, in a new year.






Thom P. Miller
April 30, 2009

(A birthday poem, in the tradition of Dylan Thomas}