Toad Music

 

 

 

Now the peepers have all but called it a spring,

And all is in blossom and bloom, and the rains that have quenched

The wakened root's thirst leave the wetlands puddled and drenched.

And songs have been sung, and there are songs yet to sing,

And the performance now upon us

Is of Bufo Americanus—

It's toad music!  Beautiful, rollicking toad music!

From the swollen woodland pools and the flooded meadows

We hear their roundsong of finely trilled falsettos.

It's toad music!  All-American toad music.

 

They clambered out of the vernal land

In their handsome hides of pebble and sand,

And that changeless gaze that so unsettles,

Those eyes of onyx and precious metals—

And now to the warmed May waters they're drawn

To sing and to splash as they couple and spawn.

And you think that toads would enamor

With some shrill or bellowing clamor?

No!  The mists by the moon they fill

With a steady delirious trill.

 

The Earth's philharmonic is born of desire,

It's art for the sake of becoming and being—nothing is worth a song

That doesn't spur the species along; and so with this goggle-eyed throng:

There's an orgy beneath that moonlighted choir!

For these harmonists that so besot—

Well, castratos they are surely not,

These reveling trillers of toad music!

And they'll wrestle and woo in the buoyant fray

Till their four-eyed pairings greet the glow of the day

With no echo left of their toad music.

 

The American toads in their mystic Braille

We’ll greet at the garden or the woodland trail,

While their spawn is afloat with their cousin frogs,

And toadlets will morph from the pollywogs,

And may they be favored to flourish and gather once more

To serenade in the May on the moonlighted shore—

And truly, it ought to be more than a plea,

For the American songbook—what would it be

Without toad music?  Beautiful, rollicking toad music!

Our Maytime anthem of toad music.