Certainly, This Mockingbird

All night the mockingbird has declared his song, repeating, varying, shading. It has kept me awake. I do not mind this fluting in the darkness, but rather wonder - did dinosaurs also sing, those great precursors, whose bone racks rake the air in museums? I think I shall think they did - at least the small ones: perhaps a Gregorian chant pre-warble. Listen - do you think the hawks came to their soaring with no pterasaurs as precedents, and the struggles of early gliders trying to learn feathers? No. I see fern forests, now coal, full of play, hear melody, and if time's vaults clanged shut on dinosaurs, some grace and music squeezed through cracks, lived on, leapt out in flight and through the throats of present birds - and certainly this mockingbird.