To one particular mocking bird on the last day of March, 2011:

There you are, you sit on the limb of a sycamore and you run through your repertory; it’s long and I recognize only bits of gull song, Brewer’s blackbird, hummingbird, sparrow. You sit on that bough, under the same sun as I, same blue sky, a blueness, which the New York Times today explained calmly for its readers. You sing. I sit at my desk. Your song sounds urgent, pretty but urgent, because it is spring and finally it’s warm, the rain has moved on, for now, and you want to get on with business--dreary to work in the damp and wet of rain. I think this for myself and for you. I don’t want to envy you. After all, you are “only a bird,” and what does a bird know, compared to me? Do you know what I know? Do you know what’s happening while you and I are busy? Do you know about us making electricity in a very special way? in nuclear power plants, all so that we can have more things? and that these plants have fuel rods that are extremely dangerous while they’re producing electricity and even more dangerous after they aren’t making electricity? Do you know that, right now, as you sit in the sycamore and I at my desk, right near us, we have a lot of these spent fuel rods? even more than in Japan?--It’s a dream of ours to always have more than anyone else of any one thing. But, and here is the best part: neither they nor we, nor anyone anywhere knows what to do with all of these rods except keep them cool forever? Forever. Do you even know about forever? Used to be, forever was God’s purview. What am I going to do with forever? Cooling fuel rods forever. Live forever so that I can keep something cool forever, keep something covered with water forever, not hobnob with angels before God’s throne forever, as I’d been promised. No angels, no sherbet fed to me by beautiful maidens, no return for my descendents, generation after generation, until we get it right. No, forever I’ll be guarding spent fuel rods. Forever. You don’t even know this, you poor bird, you. You get to come and go, find food, defecate every once and a while, defend your nest, sing until it’s time to turn over the keys to the next tenants.

GHC