Matin No. 2 Poem by John Surowiecki

With the morning's bird calls comes a woman's sobbing
and I'm left to eavesdrop, to reconcile sympathy with
helplessness and speculate on first causes. My guess:

loneliness, no longer compromised, no longer comforted,
has finally found its voice. She stops when the chickadee
ends its two-note lament and the dove its hollow moan.

People are leaving for work and she's either among them
or, like me, she's listening to the fragments of her song
in a mockingbird's revised parody of how a day begins.