The Parrot’s Voice

by Robert Tawse

That the parrot could speak still and remember
The ageless turpitude and ripening garden,
That the parrot could speak the words of God,
Before Adam was man and, naked, knew himself.

Those raging cacophonous colors
So flagrant and fearless,
Intrepid like some airborne nautalid
Raging against order, against silence.

It was not that its bright plumage rose
Towards the aether, but rather that we,
Shrinking, fell, and that voice was left
There to always remind of the immeasurable.

That hard, metal grey mouth
Steeling firm the fact that we
Are not alone in our craft,
And that there was one creature

Who did not fall with the rest—
Fools, snared in the vice of knowledge,
Lulled, by the firm steel of its grip.

The parrot’s mouth was always steel,
Hard as the bite of that verboten apple;
The two were forged in the same mould
By the hoary hammer of that Noachian Smithy.

What were the words spoken in that belvedere?
Were they some argot or patois now unknown?
Was it the emblazoned language of the Past,
The Creator’s love of song and word in voice

Trailing away like a ship’s wake until,
Unknown, it receded and dissolved
Into the horizon? What was left there
In the wake of that first absence?

The ideas borne of celestial silence
Should have remained untranslatable,
Left to collect dust as the ages passed,
Their interminable tides transient

Beneath the equable hand and eye
Of the father whose Equatorial Eden
Could contain the brilliant strain
Of vivid voice and florid feather.

Adam must have watched in wonder
As that last blessed bird stayed
Amid the sultry warmth of repeated summer
While he saw finally that all things end
And that thou art a man and God is so much more.
What own humanity was there to adore?
What, when that bird was left to sound its voice:
Polysyllabic Polly, laughing at the cracker?