Juliet’s Question

It was the one hour in the long twenty-four that stands off alone to itself, far away from midnight, not the least bit close to the dawn. 

 The very dead of night.  

Three am.

I alone was awake in the house.  I alone heard the song.  An eerie tune, almost macabre, that rose up out of the trees in the garden, so unexpected, so strange, a concerto performed by a feathered musician hitherto unheard in these parts.

Singing full tilt at the top of his lungs, like a sentinel warning of battle, his shrill voice split through the night like an arrow.  I slipped out of bed and went to the window.  The Flower moon, so full in the sky, illuminated all her white subjects - Annabelle's and impatiens, gardenia and rose.  They shone like a gargantuan strand of Mother Nature’s best pearls, broken and scattered cross a navy blue floor.

The anonymous bird sang his song on and on, with barely a stop between stanzas, more urgent than joyful, a song for the night.  

“Who is he?”, I thought, as a shudder ran its finger along my shoulders.
 A raven herald of myth, or a starling in the midst of a dream?  A phoenix rising from the ashes of the moon, or a firebird in search of the sun’s golden fruit?

 So I wondered as Juliet had long before me,

 was it the Lark or the Nightingale that sang in my garden,
 long after midnight, too early for dawn?

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JULIET

 Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day: 

    It was the nightingale, and not the lark, 

    That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear; 

    Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree: 

    Believe me, love, it was the nightingale. 

ROMEO 

It was the lark, the herald of the morn, 

    No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks 

    Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east: 

    Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day 

    Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. 

    I must be gone and live, or stay and die. 

Romeo and Juliet

Act 3, Scene 5

by William Shakespeare