“She was not singing for them.”
A Dawn bird of The Dawn Chorus
4 known connections · an open question
A nightingale, the chorus's first singer and its legend. She sings the most complex song of any bird — two hundred phrases, no repeats — and she sings it in the dark, for no audience but the night itself.
Every poet who ever heard her got it wrong. She does not mind. She was not singing for them.
The chorus waits for her spring return the way other worlds wait for rain.
“After the lyrebird performed her whole song back to her flawlessly, the nightingale sang a phrase no one had ever heard — the two-hundred-and-first. Lyra tried to learn it and could not; it would not stay in his memory, the way a dream will not stay past morning. He has stopped trying. He says some songs are not for keeping.”
Philomel's two-hundred-and-first phrase has no audience either.
“She sings two hundred phrases for no audience; it has never been seen by any audience. The Speaker, asked whether the two secrets are the same secret, blinked — rarely, on purpose — and the parliament fell silent. The silence lasted a full minute. No one has asked again. Some questions are answered by not being asked.”
The nightingale and the feather are the sky's two perfect secrets.
The songbirds: nightingales, lyrebirds, thrushes, and wrens — the musicians whose dawn performance the whole world sets its clock by.
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