Songs of Our Cells

In dreams I hear the songs I cannot hear:

leeches tap, earthworms and snakes

rattle their skeletons.

In these white pines

the thrush, the red-winged blackbird and the dove

sing in antiphony; under that earthly clatter,

I hear a canorous thunder and I know

I am inhabited by tiny remnants—

bits of viruses and organelles—

that go through evolutionary storms

with genes of fathers. Carrying the dead,

we are descended from a single cell,

waking to song.