NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 23rd): Aria at Dawn

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty-Three): Happy Wednesday, everyone, and happy twenty-third day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month.

Today, our featured participant is Elizabeth Boquet, who brings us a poem with a poem in it in response to Day Twenty-Two’s lessons-based prompt.

Our resource for the day is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum’s online image collection is practically endless, and to call it varied would be an understatement. There’s over 2,000 images just of baseball cards! To say nothing of candelabra featuring what appears to be a scandalized swan, a processional sword belonging to the guardsman of a sixteenth-century German duke, and a couch that I would very much like to fall upon in a melodramatic swoon.

And last but not least, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Humans might be the only species to compose music, but we’re quite famously not the only ones to make it. Birdsong is all around us – even in cities, there are sparrows chirping, starlings making a racket. And it’s hardly surprising that birdsong has inspired poets. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that focuses on birdsong. Need examples? Try A.E. Stallings’ “Blackbird Etude,” or for an old-school throwback, Shelley’s “To a Skylark.”

Happy writing!

Aria at Dawn

The city’s throat clears—
a soft cough of engines, a clatter of gates—
but before it all, before coffee brews or dogs bark
the birds begin.

A warbler tries jazz
from the streetlamp’s cold halo—
riffs like a saxophone too caffeinated to sleep.
Somewhere, a pigeon gargles Gregorian chants
into the gutter.

The sparrows? Oh, they’re gossiping.
Treetop tabloids.
Who nested where.
Who left which feather behind.
Who dared peck at her reflection again.

Then, with the self-importance of a town crier
who’s late but refuses to admit it,
a chicken bursts in.

BA-GAWK!
Not so much a song
as a declaration of presence,
a feathered manifesto
delivered from the coop steps
like protest from behind a picket fence.

And from the power lines,
a crow cuts through it all.
Not melody,
but judgment.
A single, gravel-rough Caw—
low, deliberate,
like punctuation
at the end of everyone else’s nonsense,
or a vote cast after long silence.

It silences even the breeze.

I sit with my chipped mug,
half-amused, half-awed.
This world sings in strange choruses—
some with harmony, some with heat.

Once, I thought morning belonged
to alarms and asphalt.
Now I know:

The overture is avian—
jazzed, clucked, and cawed
into light’s slow rise—
[not waiting for permission to begin.]

- Oizys.