Youth’s trumpet song,
and though unable to speak,
one can still gander.

Fanfare for
foreign bodies: honk if you’ve heard
this one before.

The sound of a
single baying hound, bereft of
the pack and feathers, and

when little boys swallow,
curiosity kills the goose that lays
a golden vocal.

Call /
Voice /
Sound.

It goes in and out
and in and out and in and out
and in and out:

there are ways
to talk without, but you will
never fly again.

(In 1848, a German physician, Dr Burrow, removed a goose’s larynx from a boy’s throat. It was the fad at that time and place for children to blow through the larynx of a recently killed/slaughtered goose to imitate its sound. Aged 12, the boy had accidently swallowed the larynx in this playing around, and nearly died before it was surgically removed. It is recorded that before the operation, when the boy exhaled – with great difficulty in trying to breathe – he sounded like a goose)