Still Singing

by David Stalling

They lift silver muzzles to the moon,
and stitch the dark with sound.
A ribbon of wild music,
pulled tight across the sky.

Song dogs,
we named you lightly,
as if your voices were a trick of wind.
But there is nothing light
about the way you sing.

This is the season of promise,
when winter loosens its iron grip
and hidden dens grow warm with breath.
When mates move like shadows,
side by side,
faithful as frost to morning grass.

You travel the margins of our making;
fence lines,
highways,
vacant lots.

Ghosts in the machinery
of cities. 
Gold eyes bright
with borrowed starlight.

We call you nuisance,
vermin,
thief.

We set traps with metal teeth,
send bullets chasing your echoes,
declare our private wars
against your hunger,
against your howl.

Still,
at dusk you rise.
Lean and weather-wise,
rib-thin from hard moons,
you step from the sage like a prayer
the earth refuses to swallow.

Your voices gather,
one clear note,
then another,
then a wild, weaving chorus
that tumbles over rooftops and canyon walls
and dares the night to answer.

What are you singing?
Not surrender.
Not apology.
You sing of mates met in snowlight,
of small blind pups rooting for milk,
of the old trails remembered in bone.

You sing of survival; 
a bright, unbroken thread
running through centuries of fire and poison.

We have tried to quiet you
with steel and smoke,
with bounty and blame,
but your music slips every noose.

It rises from wheat fields and suburbs alike,
from deserts cracked like old paint,
from hills where the wind keeps secrets.

O resilient ones,
teachers of the in-between,
may we learn from your narrow, tireless feet
how to live with less
and love fiercely in lean times.

When you sing,
the world feels wider,
not owned,
not conquered,
but shared.

And somewhere beneath our noise,
your chorus threads the dark again,
a fierce, tender anthem:

We are still here.
We are still here.
We are still singing.