A Bird Comes Calling and Other Sounds

It's morning and a bird sits outside the living room window, yelling, clearly. I tiptoe over and peek, not wanting to scare him/her away. Searching the branches of the Lantana fence, I finally spot the noisemaker, a fantastically brilliant bird with a glossy black back, like a tuxedo with elegantly long tails, and a red, red, densely red chest, like a captivating cummerbund. He tweets and twills and looks about, hopping amongst the spade-shaped leaves.

A glimpse of divinity.

He follows the turn of the fence and is soon out of sight. But he's still there, still twilling and tweeting. With his song come other twills from other birds, fluttering in nearby trees and over the corn patch next door. The rooster in the corn patch crows, causing roosters in other yards to crow, causing a dog to bark, which causes dogs up and down our street to bark, so you can hear the echo being mimicked by dogs all over Kisumu, like the wave baseball fans make in a stadium, eventually returning and seemingly never-ending.

Then there's a cow moo, deep, loud and harmless. Cow feet shuffle in the dirt and clop on the pavement, passing just outside our gate, headed, herded on their daily round of grass seeking, usually tended by an old mama in her scarf-wrapped head or young boys with sticks, walking barefoot, trying to keep the spring calf from leaping playfully into a car's grill.

Thin music comes on the wind, sometimes, from a nearby house or passing car. Dishes settle musically into their rightful places on shelves, glasses clink into rows in neighboring cupboards. Tiny claps sound as beads tied to cloth billow in the slow breeze and fall back against the window frame. Makeshift curtains. Sometimes screaming, shouting, comes loud and harsh from a nearby bandstand where preachers use loudspeakers to reach large audiences. And a man and a woman sing, then scream at each other with spiritual music in the background, tension building, tension building until I begin to look for the earplugs. Children sing spirituals in imitation, run in the red soil, pounding the earth into wisps of dustlets, and laugh up to the palest of moons. Darkness arrives, slowly, and the loudspeakers are turned off. Night birds get busy with their twattering, boda boda bells on handlebars send their tinny twirps as warnings to walkers in the lowing light.

Voices glide gently from other places, other spaces, other tongues. Female on female, male on male and then a glorious mix of the two, melodic. Comforting. Steady. Sounds.

Songs.

Of man and beast, fauna and fowl. Birds become frisky in late hours, increasing their volume, their pitch, their frequency. The steadiest background noise, both day and night, is the call of the cockerel. He's in every yard on every block and he loves to sings his might.

A grounded bird, but singing nonetheless.