Twice now, in the dark before the light comes back over the eastern field, the small square thing in the room I lean against has begun to shriek, and the sleeping human lurches up as though struck. This has happened every morning of this warm season, before the first bird, before the sun has bothered to warm my bark, and each time the human strikes it silent and lies still a moment, breathing, mourning something I cannot name.
I have known the roots to wake, in their fashion. Sap rises when the ground softens; the buds do not need shrieking to know it is time. Nothing in the soil is ever late. But the walking ones seem to fear that morning will come and find them still lying down, and so they have made a little bird of metal to frighten them upright, ahead of the true birds, ahead of me.
I have shaded a great many of these small hurried creatures. A boy carved his name into my south side one autumn and pressed his palm flat against the cut. I felt him come back, taller, quieter, years later, and stand a while, and go. The scar is still there. He is not.
The shrieking thing will rust before the boy's grandchildren are grown. The room will fall. And I will still be here in the cold hour before the light, holding that healed-over name in my side, waking to nothing louder than the wind through my highest branches, in no hurry at all to meet a morning that has never once failed to arrive.