Nightjar Songtext
von HAELLA

The road was silver under rain
Telephone wires humming low
Something moved beyond the headlights
But I could not make it known
Just the sound, just the call
Falling through the eucalyptus dark

There′s a bird that sings at midnight
Hidden somewhere near the creek

Never showing its whole body
Only fragments when it speaks
The old farmers call it ghost song
A voice without a face
Like the earth itself remembering
Every creature it misplaced
And I stood there in the gravel
Breathing woodsmoke, breathing coal
Feeling something ancient turning
In the undergrowth below


Nightjars sleep against the branches
Feathered perfectly to bark
Whole lives passing undiscovered
Inside ordinary dark
Not survival through dominion
Not by making themselves known
But by becoming almost invisible
To everything but home

I thought about the way we live now

Always lit from every side
Always trying to leave evidence
We were here before we died

Oh, nightjars singing through the valley
Low and hidden in the heat
Oh, every quiet living creature
Keeping secrets while we sleep
Not lost, not lonely
Just listening beneath the noise

Out behind the petrol station
Moths kept circling the light


Burning themselves into spirals
Against the artificial white
But out past the fences, farther
Near the flooded river gums
The dark was still enormous
Still alive and overcome
And somewhere in the blackened branches
That small invisible throat
Kept stitching all the silence
Into one continuous note

Maybe wisdom isn't brightness
Maybe beauty isn′t loud
Maybe every living thing survives
By disappearing into cloud
The nightjar never asks attention
Never conquers, never owns
Still the whole forest rearranges
Around the shape of its song
And hearing it, I felt my body

Become smaller than before
Not diminished, only placed back
Inside something more enormous

Oh, nightjars singing in the margins
Of the highways and the fields
Oh, tiny pulse inside the darkness
Teaching broken things to heal
Not gone, not silent
Just hidden underneath the world

Near dawn the air grew colder
Mist collected on the grass
Every sound became enormous
Then disappeared as quickly passed
And finally, for one second

Near the roadside bending south
I saw the bird emerge from shadow
Moonlight silvering its mouth

Then it vanished with the silence
Back into the paperbarks
Leaving only breath and crickets
And the trembling of the dark

Oh, nightjar calling through the half-light
Through the blue before the sun
Oh, every hidden living creature
Part of one enormous hum
Not separate, not forgotten
Just briefly passing through the night

Teach me how to move more gently
How to leave a softer trace
How to love the world completely
Without needing to be seen
Without needing to be seen
The dark is full of listening