Love Song for a Competitive Javanese Singing Cock

Ayam Pelung are roosters in Java, Indonesia, that are bred to sing competitively. The government, in trying to eradicate avian influenza, had an initiative to cull all the birds from an infected flock. “Fair” compensation was available, based on commercial layers and broilers. I was visiting a village suspected of having Bird Flu; villagers were breeding and competing with Ayam Pelung. I asked myself: What is a chicken worth? Tell me, one über-preening species to another, what is the market value of a rooster’s song? The song below was my answer.

Love Song for a Competitive Javanese Singing Cock

Dear Ayam Pelung , crowing awake the blazing day, sing to me of what is lost, the throaty blues of hearts brought low by crass abundance. Pause and cock your head amid the children and the scattered corn, the old man grinning in a blue, clove-scented cloud of kretek smoke. Raise your vermilion comb. Stretch out your long, dark feathery snake-like neck. You are the voice of the wild pheasant in the city, the throaty soul of this foul city, my heart. Let me stroke your gloss, the feathers, green, and flaming, and black as char. And let me hold you, feel the nubbles of the light-as-air-filled bones slip under skin, the heart still fiercely pounding in its cage.

Oh my handsome one, my rooster, let us croon laments of buckets and chalets, of chicken fingers, of how the once-proud jungle fowl are fallen. How far, how very far. Let us sing like Cesaria Evora, like Satchmo, like Bizet’s Pearl Fishers. Fly for me. Let us go fly fishing for fireflies in the sun-glossed, mirrored lake of a rice paddy. Let us scrabble in the wilderness for joy. Burst from my arms. Wait for me in the arms of the mango tree. Wait until the bird flu police are gone. You are a flower among the dark leaves. You are the song of the tree. You are jasmine tea in the afternoon of our leave-taking. Loosen your tongue with honey and clove. Loosen the tumbling monsoon clouds. Loosen the march of seasons and good sense. Make us young, strutting long-necked through the swirl of muddy streets. Lift us with your song. Lift us above the rivers of dead fowl, the grasping flood of shopkeepers. Settle us in the crown of a cassava grove, gently lilting, swaying, singing.

Let us never stop singing.