The first day of spring

There is a shocking violence 

in the birds singing this morning

– this quiescent sunday morning –

perhaps they think that

after so many rainy, dirty days 

they ought to have the right to sing

for they do it so boisterously

– almost belligerent in the face of peace –

with a raw, unfettered rage

as if they cried ‘spring is here, spring is here!’

with a jagged knife to our throat

curdling both blood and coffee

like so many threats of burning the world down

they chant the behoveliness of revelling in

nature and life in drunken ecstasy 

upon pain of painful death

– enjoy or die –

– dance or die –

– fuck or die –

– and that’s final –

they don’t seem to care 

if their lungs explode in the chorus

– those scruffy savages

frothing at the beak –

or if they starve to death

– they sing, unrelenting

with every fibre of their frail bodies –

their incessant, arrogant cacophony

fomented it seems since the last equinox

isn’t a celebration, it’s an invitation to murder

to a clamorous massacre

in every hue and smell spring brings

as we all must partake in the rite

they’re past febrility, or even tension:

they’re out for bloody mayhem, these birds are

spurred on by a ferocious hunger

and ravenous lust for their

bellowing decrees the solitude of the flesh over

– step into the light and break body and heart –

as if the only way to cope with so much beauty

was to wreck and laugh and bleed and dance

yet it seems such a small price to pay

in the grand decadence sung

in the sunlit-engorged fury

of the birds’ extravagant song

for we know deep down they’re right

our hair prickling on the nape of the neck

and a jubilant sizzling in the pit of the stomach

with so many things to look forward to

– death, love, sex, comedies, tragedies –

on the first day of spring.