Baby Wrens’ Voices
I am a student of wrens. When the mother bird returns to her brood, beak squirming with winged breakfast, a shrill clamor rises like jingling from tiny, high-pitched bells. Who’d have guessed such a small house contained so many voices? The sound they make is the pure sound of life’s hunger. Who hangs our house in the world’s branches, and listens when we sing from our hunger? Because I love best those songs that shake the house of the singer, I am a student of wrens. Thomas R. Smith