A Bird in the Slums

Every morning for years you woke to a bird
cat’s cradling a song outside your window
in the slum building you lived in: strange word
sounding against city cement as from a country hedgerow.
Its song welcomed each day to you, you
to each day; a random, serendipitous gift,
a peculiar gift, like those of light and snow,
of wind and dew and warmth and rain, as if
the generous randomness of life itself
had settled, unseen (you never saw the bird),
outside your window, calling you awake,
calling you alive, out of the dark,
before the dawn, a witness of itself,
the flesh clothing its song as it spoke its word.