Dave Bonta's short poem puts us in the dark, listening. The speaker hears calls they can't quite place, and each one feels strange. The poem never says exactly what is making them, but the images suggest birds, and also something more human and more painful. "Throats that never were people / cry higher" is an odd, unsettling line: it seems to say that these voices aren't human, yet they sound like suffering we recognize.
The speaker's own mood is heavy. A hope sinks "into my night bag," as if disappointment is just one more thing to carry. The line about "another body in pain / over another body" repeats that sense of suffering piling up. Still, the ending shifts. Birch and oak burn "and fly at last," so destruction becomes release, and trees turn into something winged. The mood stays dark and uneasy, but it opens briefly toward transformation, as if pain might lift into flight, or into song.