The owl asks “Who?”
asks Who is mocking whom?”
He knows he’s wise
but sometimes finds it hard
to discern when the mocker’s faking.
Perhaps he says he hears Fats Domino
crooning “On Blueberry Hill,” that old sage
remembering how once he found his thrill.

Or is it John Craton’s composition
for the young violinist practicing
pizzicatos, glissandos, and trills?
Native Americans called the mockingbird
“one with four-hundred tongues,”
and it seems all of them are loose
at once when the nesting bird
of the Mimidae family is stirred to fury.

In the Mobile-Tensaw Delta,
when the word is moonstruck
over music warbling the night,
no bird, not even one of the human kind,
need ask “who?” Or question 
the rightness of a song.
It is enough to join in
and sing along, sing along
as if the owl and the mockingbird
know more than maybe
humans do about wooing
and loving.

“Who?” Owl asks.
“What’s that song?”
Just the Ross Lynch lyric,
“I Love Christmas”
which in the Delta might go
something like this:
Billion stars are binkin’
A million owls are hootin’
and hundred toot-took-tootin’
“I love Christmas.”