can words give us wings?

With the temperature dropping to -20 C. tonight plus windchill, again I wonder where the birds -- if there are any birds: I have seen so few in the past weeks -- will find shelter. During the gale-force winds a few weeks ago I was huddled over a warm computer reading a draft of a poem written by a friend who is an accomplished and award-winning poet. She had discovered the work of photographer Harri Kallio whose fascination with the extinction of the dodo from its home on the Mauritius Islands led to undertaking (an appropriate term in both senses) its life-like "re-creation" in order to photograph the manufactured bird in the dodo's original biogeographical niche. My friend wrote a poem about the bird and its fate, and the oddness of its reimagining; the draft of her poem so moved me that, in conjunction with reading Peter Quammen's brilliant book, The Song of the Dodo:Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, I sat and listened to the wind howling and began to imagine what this world would be like if all the birds I'm used to seeing were to go the way of the dodo.

What resulted was a lament for the absence of birds, from imagining this city without birds, and having also been reading the play, Birds, by Aristophanes -- I combined words with wings in my own poem, "faster than flight":

"INFORMER: How can words give a man wings?
PEISTHETAERUS: Words can give everybody wings."
-- from Aristophanes, Birds

faster than the flight of any
bird this December wind
from where we stand the snow
blows sideways and all the birds
have hidden still our flight
inside to a hollow hearth
with winter howling down with
darkness more hours than light
breeds nights so deep in dis-
ordered dreams and no
birdsong or morning song
to wake us or -- is this
night the long wake of all
the unsung ones now plucked
and eaten dead lamented as
dodos long gone how long
till all gone till gone is
forgotten and where shall
we go? flightless
into air empty of song, passion
imagination memory pulled
from our pens -- o quills that were:

where will we be? our songs too
unsung

This is still what might be called a "raw" or uncooked version, not likely to change much however, as the rawness in this instance is all, and sometimes there's a place for an outburst of poetry such as the old skalds in the mead halls would have brought forth.

I believe we need to sing and praise our fellow creatures whenever possible; we don't need the clash of ipod overflow and supermarket/elevator/coffee shop piped in muzak -- we need to listen to other songs from the world outside.