A song based on a poem by Richard Jones.
 
Songbirds live
in the old cathedral,
caged birds bought at the street market
and freed as a kind of offering.
Now doves and finches and parakeets
nest in the crooks of the nave’s highest arches, roosting on the impossibly high
sills of stained-glass windows,
looking down into the valley of the altar
as if from cliffs.
Twice a day, you’ll hear them singing: at dawn
when the blue light
of angels’ wings
and the yellow light of halos
flood into their nests to wake them;
and during the mass
when the organ fills
the valley below with thunder.
these birds love thunder,
never having seen a drop of rain.
They love it when the people below stand up and sing. They fly
in mad little loops
from window to window,
from the tops of arches
down toward the candles in the tombs, making the sign of the cross.
If you look up during mass to the world’s light falling to the arms of saints, you can see birds flying true blue columns of incense as if it were simple wood smoke rising from a cabin’s chimney in a remote and hushed forest.