Cars and Birds:

The road behind our house - about 50 yards away - used to be narrow and little traveled, but a few years ago became a four-lane divided highway (whose construction required the destruction of a beaver dam, among other things). There are still trees between our bedroom window and the highway, but in winter, they provide no buffer, and even in summer, the car noise has made the local birds hoarse (I imagine), trying to get their communications across. Perhaps it's not that the number of coarse-voiced crows has increased, but that birds evolve into crows as exhaust darkens them and competition with motors coarsens their voices. I wrote the following one morning as an excuse to delay getting out of my bed, near the window that looks out through the trees (summer treess, the highway only glimpsed, mainly heard).

Those summer trees
could go on forever...
hum of cars.

All day, all night
car noise. Hearing my blood...
Ah, no cars!.

From tiny trembles
of leaves comes this roar
of motors?

Listening to cars...
now I can just barely hear
birds singing.

Hard to hear birds
over car noise. No wonder
they shit on them.

Shutting the window
muffles car noise...
and birds.

Shutting the window
hushes cars. I can hear
the air conditioner.