Ann Ang; Koel calls
Where do birds go when they die? Do they rain down buildings in flights of echoes, in ambulance sirens, or pass like trains?
Does a flower-pecker become a whistling-kettle?
Is this why you hear parroting in lifts, grunt at the bark of an owl, or breath holding an evening full of windowed estates with house-swifts drawing down blinds behind wind chimes, stirred by crimson-eyed starlings among berried palms?
Tell me, have you ever seen a dead bird? Are they, like us, mindful when they die? Do they sing, as we grieve, incomprehensibly? Is flight to them like our faith in ourselves, so mundane that we forget to read auguries in sparrowhawks, or wonder how a body may fall through the same height that lends us a view of stairwells, service balconies, water-tanks, hills?
Do they, unlike us, migrate without assuming differences, so that a koel calls before daybreak to question a sunrise elsewhere? Do we put a name to plumage and whistling-rite, only to undress our ears and eyes? Do we live? Can they die?
