When babies sang their first songs in small hospital beds
we assume they babbled nonsense. We don’t think that
their minds understand the world, but nor are they understood.
Their songs are a polyphony of screams, laughters, and cries,
amateur, baffling, whimsical music
like the love songs of a New England humpback whale
submitted across the ocean. I heard that scientists who haven’t even talked to the whales about their love lives warn that the songs are either lost in transmission
or wasted in the ears of a foreign whale, who speaks perhaps Antarctican Whalish.
So they performed recitals for no one but themselves, said us.
Or so we thought, because we are an arrogant audience.
Say, that pristine voice of the whale is not meant for a lover,
but its part due for a concert called ocean,
the music of all seafaring creatures joined in harmony,
a perfect symphony.
A symphony which outlives human beings,
A symphony which echoes the choir of the babies,
A whole performance only one appreciated:
A multitude of forests, a wolf resting at the peak of a mountain, the bursting lava of a volcano, and the breeze that just brushed against the faces of you and me.
In a word: this Earth.