! ! Those Birds Poem by Michael Shepherd

Those birds outside your window at dawn
singing all at once fit to bust –

did you know they migrate from Islam
in the fighting season?

They’re all Sufis: they sleep all night
with the Beloved; and in the morning

they exchange the jokes they heard,
the pillow talk from the night before sleep;

then the blackbird and the thrush
weave these into stories which they sing

all day; then at night the nightingale
makes them all into one beautiful poem

about being intoxicated into song
by the wine of Shiraz; the rose-water wafers;

and how those who say
that one cannot be intoxicated

by the longing for the One
have proved themselves wrong

and proved the nightingale right
as you can know in yourself

when the nightingale sings of this
to the heart’s light pulsing in the stars.