Category: Birds

Seize Each Day Gently

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Certain I can’t carry
another sadness,
I step outside
and let the shine
of the mid-morning sun
stroke my cheek
like a lover.
And the air has a strange
bright citrus tang.
I inhale it
again and again.
Whatever it means
to be alive,
it has something
to do with this—
scent of leaf
and spruce and shadow.
The astonishing warmth
of a late October day.
The weight
of loving another,
that weight
without which
I would be nothing.
~Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer “Whatever It Means” from The Wonderment: Poems

Night and day
seize the day, also the night —
a handful of water to grasp.
The moon shines off the mountain
snow where grizzlies look for a place
for the winter’s sleep and birth.
I just ate the year’s last tomato
in the year’s fatal whirl.
This is mid-October, apple time.
I picked them for years.
One Mcintosh yielded sixty bushels.

Fifty years later we hold each other looking
out the windows at birds, making dinner,
a life to live day after day, a life of
dogs and children and the far wide country
out by rivers, rumpled by mountains.
So far the days keep coming.
Seize the day gently as if you loved her.
~Jim Harrison, from “Carpe Diem” from Dead Man’s Float

What prayer or magic spell or luck
leaves us breathless, thunder struck
just from looking in each other’s eyes
across the breakfast table? Surprise
of love comes as a kind of Divine Grace,
as if I’d never seen your face
before and now am stunned that you adore
the likes of me; whatever for
I do not know but now you’re stuck
and seem enamored of my face, its every ruck
and deep crevasse your sheer delight; it defies
all reason. Yet this spell causes us to rise
and with no word we tenderly embrace.
The sweetest feelings rush to fill the space
as if God came in through an open door
and we are nothing like we were before.
~Red Hawk “The Transformation” from #45 – Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

Over forty-five years later,
the days keep coming,
a life lived together
day after day after day.

I try not to take a single one for granted,
each morning
a gift to be seized gently,
embraced with reverent gratitude.

There is so much to cling to,
as if this were the only day,
the only night,
knowing it can never come again.

There is so much that has passed,
like a blink –
we wonder where time disappears to,
where it hides after it disappears over the horizon.

There is so much to remember
and never forget.
There is so much yet to come
that is unknowable.

So I seize each day,
oh so gently,
like a lover.

Calling Out to Others

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geese113162
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A psalm of geese
labours overland

cajoling each other
near half…

The din grew immense.
No need to look up.

All you had to do
was sit in the sound

and put it down
as best you could…

It’s not a lonesome sound
but a panic,

a calling out to the others
to see if they’re there;
~Dermot Healy from A Fool’s Errand

geese913
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We are here to witness the creation and abet it.
We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed.
Together we notice not only each mountain shadow
and each stone on the beach but, especially,
we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other.
We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power
that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
We witness our generation and our times.
We watch the weather.
Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.
~Annie Dillard from The Meaning of Life edited by David Friend

geese1119152

Over the past week, the cacophony from the constant calling of migrating geese has been deafening at times. They pass overhead by the hundreds on their way to their winter homes, sometimes landing in nearby harvested cornfields for a snack.

Soon they are on their way again. Their voices call out, commanding my full attention during the brief time they are here:
going home, going home, I am going home.

I can’t help but notice; they are calling out to anyone who will listen.

It reminds me of my past doctoring work in my clinic; at times I felt overwhelmed by the amount of “noticing” I needed to do as part of my job. Each patient – and there were so many – deserved my full attention for the few minutes we are together.

I would start my clinical evaluation the moment I walked into the exam room, taking in all the complex verbal and non-verbal clues sometimes offered by another human being.

How and why are they reaching out to me? What do they want and need me to notice and understand? I must listen carefully.

I become audience and a witness; even more, I must understand it in order to best assist them. I must rise to the occasion of taking in another person, offering them the gift of being noticed and being there for them, just them.

The doctoring work I did became its own kind of love: the patient became the entire focus for a few moments. I was grateful to be watching and listening.

As my patients called out to me, on their own life journey, may they never have felt they were playing to an empty house.

geesesouth
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The Soul Creeps Out of the Tree

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Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.

And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.
~Louise Glück “All Hallows”

All houses wherein men have lived and died
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.

We meet them at the door-way, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
A sense of something moving to and fro.

There are more guests at table than the hosts
Invited; the illuminated hall
Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts,
As silent as the pictures on the wall.

The stranger at my fireside cannot see
The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;
He but perceives what is; while unto me
All that has been is visible and clear…

…So from the world of spirits there descends
A bridge of light, connecting it with this,
O’er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,
Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from “Haunted Houses”

Most of the apples have already fallen.
The sunflowers turn into dusty spiked balls.
But what if my land is the land of the living?
The bird from the dust takes flight
Then turns multiple—

A handful of birds rising in the dead sky
Opened to receive them.
But my loves for now are here and living, and I want more of them.
Like the bird on the ground I pick what I need from the dust.
~Lindsay Turner from Halloween

The old trees on this farm have souls,
bearing fruit for all to enjoy,
the deer, the raccoons, the birds, our family.

Rarely, when one topples in a windstorm,
its 100-plus years of fruitfulness abruptly ended,
I sense its soul’s return to the dust beneath,
sinking back to the roots
which held firm through many storms,
its hollow trunk now a telescope to the beyond.

Goodbye, sweet broken soul.
To dust we someday return
until called back to fruitfulness…

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
~ Maya Angelou from “When Great Trees Fall”

Watching the Rain Happen

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Immense, entirely itself,
it wore that yard like a dress,

with limbs low enough for me to enter it
and climb the crooked ladder to where

I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.

One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell
darkening the sidewalk.

Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches,
I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,

watching it happen without it happening to me.
~Marie Howe “The Copper Beech” from What the Living Do

I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man’s life
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
then with the gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.
~Wendell Berry “Stay Home” from Collected Poems

A steady silver rain pours out
over the gray world on an ordinary
morning. Drenching for hours
the field, wild flowers, soil
and all the birds off somewhere dry
in hidden nests, keeping quiet.

And you, too: keep quiet for a few hours,
let your thoughts fizz like that silver sheen,
shushshushshushshush, ceaseless sheet
of velvet, of plenty. Enough to hear, to drink,
to soak in, though you hadn’t known
how dry you were.
~Joanne Esser “What You Need: (It Doesn’t Have to Be Lightning)” from Nothing is Stationary

Yesterday morning, our county was awakened shortly after 6AM with several thunder crashes after lightning bolts flashed and illuminated our dark bedroom.

Thunder storms are unusual in the Pacific Northwest; even more unusual is an early morning storm with so much drama and subsequent dumping rain.

I was fortunate to be sheltering inside a comfortable home with a good roof — not sitting in a tree.

I was happy, watching it happen without it happening to me.

Then I looked out my kitchen window, where a drenched pine siskin sat trembling on our bird feeder, her breakfast interrupted by the downpour. No doubt she would much rather have been at home quietly sitting in her favorite tree, but as she was unable to fly so soaked by the heavy torrent, she huddled under the little cover of the feeder, trying to ride it out.

Watching her cope with her wet plumage from an unplanned bird bath, I realized I hadn’t known how dry I was.

After twenty minutes, the storm was all over as the sun began peeking out from behind roiling clouds. She shook off the excess drops from her feathers, picked out a few more seeds before launching on her way to parts unknown.

I sat and finished my toast, musing at our brief breakfast alongside one another, each safe under temporary shelter.
In her own way, she let me know:
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

And so I shall…

Lyrics:
We all need love and shelter
A place where we let go and rest
To live secure with one another
To be ourselves, not somebody else

Everybody needs respect and dignity
Everybody needs love, real love

We all need to know we’re worthy
That we are treasure to our core
We can tell the truth about our trauma
To be believed so we can be restored

Everybody needs love; everybody knows love
Is what it takes to make a life
So everybody breathe love; everyone receive love
It’s how we heal and make things right

We all need confirmation
To know that we are seen and heard
To live our lives out in freedom
Then all our flags of hope can be unfurled

We all need a place to shelter

Lyrics:
Whisper truth over me
I’m loved eternally
Never am I alone, you’re here with me
I don’t have to be afraid
Faithfulness doesn’t change
Unshakable terra firm underneath my need

I wanna know this love
A love that never dies
For when I trust I find
Your love sustains my life

Whisper grace over me
I don’t need to earn your peace
Help me surrender now as you carry me
When shadows are lengthening
I’m sheltered beneath your wings
Compassionate arms of love are still underneath

I wanna know this love
A love that never dies
For when I trust I find
Your love sustains my life

I wanna know this love
A love that never dies
For when I trust I’ll find
Your love sustains my life

An Acceptance of Decline

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In the evening there were flocks of nighthawks
passing southward over the valley. The tall
sunflowers stood, burning on their stalks
to cold seed, by the still river. And high
up the birds rose into sight against the darkening
clouds. They tossed themselves among the fading
landscapes of the sky like rags, as in
abandonment to the summons their blood knew.
And in my mind, where had stood a garden
straining to the light, there grew
an acceptance of decline. Having worked,
I would sleep, my leaves all dissolved in flight.
~Wendell Berry “September 2”

And when I rise, let me rise
Like a bird, joyfully.
And when I fall, let me fall,
Like a leaf, gracefully, without regret.
And when I stand, let me stand,
Like a tree, strong and tall.
And when I lie, let me lie,
Like a lake, peacefully, calm and still.
And when I work, let me work,
Like a bee, wholeheartedly.
And when I play, let me play,
Like a breeze, fresh and cool, light and clear.
~adapted from Wendell Berry’s “When I Rise” in The Mad Farmer Poems

The thistles, rooted out, throng in again;
The single regal rose is mobbed by weeds;
The plums, the pears, the ripening apples, rain
In the sun; and past summer plants new seeds.

Here, or there, these common yearly things
Repeat, repeat, and gardens do not range:
Yet thistles, roses, fruit trees, birds, and stings
Come to an end, and the church bells sound a change.

These many soft declensions of the day,
So hard to take to heart, bear life away.
~Dunstan Thompson from “Passage” from Here At Last Is Love

This end-of-summer winding down,
a descent into shorter days and longer nights,
this preparation for autumn austerity,
reminds me to accept my own slow decline ~
an emptying husk
once so full of fruit and seed,
now clinging to what is left of me ~
still filled with the joys, the tears, the eyes
of a brimming-over heart.

The Mundane Becomes Miraculous

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Last night
we were laying in bed
when my husband
rolled over and said,
“Do you hear birds?”
I said I heard
the laundry
dragging itself along
the inside of the dryer
as it turned.

My grandparents’ neighbor,
Doris, once said she heard
birds in the chimney.
Her in-home helper confessed
they weren’t birds—
she’d had a baby in the night
without knowing
she was pregnant.

Poems are like that,
insisting on being born,
heard, making themselves
known
as soon as we’re quiet
and still. We hear
birdsong in the ordinary,
and it sings us awake
in the dark
until the mundane becomes
miraculous.
~Elizabeth Wickland “Do You Hear Birds?”

Like people or dogs, each day is unique
and has its own personality quirks
which can easily be seen if you look closely.
But there are so few days as compared to people,
not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising
if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people.

But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed,
unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle.

For some reason we like to see days pass,
even though most of us claim
we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time.

We examine each day before us with barely a glance
and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for,
and wait in a bored sort of way for the next,
when we are convinced,
our lives will start for real.

Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted,
as some days are,
with the right amounts of sunlight and shade,
and a light breeze scented with a perfume made
from the mixture of fallen apples,
corn stubble, dry oak leaves,
and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.
~Tom Hennen  “The Life of a Day”

Age concentrates the mind.
The moment you realize you will no longer do something
you’ve done all your life.
The moment you realize that you will now need to do something you’ve never had to do before.
The moment you realize that what used to be will never be the same.

Some of this could lend itself to melancholy.
But there is also a bigness to such moments that allows for wonder.
A sense that you can’t quite comprehend it all.

Like any life, mine has had its pain,
yet from the outset it seems to have been graced
by unbelievable people and events.

An anthology of miracles.
~Roger Rosenblatt from “The World is a Room with a Piano Waiting to be Played”

I am ashamed to admit I squander time shamelessly,
blind and deaf to what is happening around me,
waiting for that particularly special day
I always dreamed of,
tossing off mundane yet irreplaceable moments
as somehow not measuring up nor exciting enough.

The shock is:
there have been nearly 40 years
of such ordinary days on this farm,
one passing by after another,
emerging fresh each morning
from the mundane duff and stuff of life,
and wouldn’t you know…
every single one has ended up being exactly what I’m looking for.

Feeling the Twinges of this World

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Under a canopy of leaves,
the irises, bountiful,
the calico butterfly flashing

and this one golden head
of a dazzling sunflower grasping
its cowled neck,

outweighing its stalk

in order to turn,
full bonneted,
to the absolute light.

What wonders these are:
things struggling
filament by filament,

birds twittering in a laughter
that could be weeping,
barely feeling the twinges of this world,

where the weak get stronger
or snailish with cracks

a day at a time.
~Judith Harris “Recovery”

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.

Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Be patient and without bitterness, and realize that the least we can do is to make coming into existence no more difficult for Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come.
~Rainier Marie Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet

We feel the twinges of struggling to live broken in difficult times; indeed, all our days are difficult times.

We won’t get out of this predicament alive, yet we are loved.

Whether we care or not about what happens
after our last breath does not alter the fact
Christ dwells alongside us;
our heavy heads bow as we turn to face
the compelling Light.

Like Mary, we must say:  “Let it be,” – not “no, not me, not now.”

We are transformed by accepting He has come on our behalf:
an oh-so-difficult faith connecting us like a slender filament to heaven:
like the bird greeting the morning with songs that weep,
like the butterfly emerging from its cracked chrysalis to try its wings,
like the cracked snail shell abandoned
because we no longer fit inside its broken confinement.

Unencumbered by My Old Nonsense

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How did I come to be
this particular version of me,
and not some other, this morning
of purple delphiniums
blooming like royalty,
destined to meet these three dogs
asleep at my feet, and not others—
this soft summer morning,
sitting on her screened porch
become ours, our wind chime
singing of wind and time,
yellow-white digitalis
feeding bees and filling me—
and more abundance to come:
basil, tomatoes, zucchini.
What luck or fate, instinct,
or grace brought me here—
in shade, beneath hidden stars,
a soft, summer morning,
seeing with my whole being,
love made visible.
~Laura Foley “The Once Invisible Garden” from Sledding in the Valley of the Shadow 

Suddenly it is August again, so hot,
breathless heat.
I sit on the ground
in the garden of Carmel,
picking ripe cherry tomatoes
and eating them.
They are so ripe that the skin is split,
so warm and sweet
from the attentions of the sun,
the juice bursts in my mouth,
an ecstatic taste,
and I feel that I am in the mouth of summer,
sloshing in the saliva of August.
Hummingbirds halo me there,
in the great green silence,
and my own bursting heart
splits me with life.
~Anne Higgins “Cherry Tomatoes” from At the Year’s Elbow

photo by Josh Scholten

At five I wake, the air
mournful in its quiet.

Such still air. Soon
the mid-morning breeze will float in
like tepid water, then hot.

How do I start this day,
I who am unsure
of how my life has happened
or how to proceed
amid this warm and steady sweetness?
~Albert Garcia from “August Morning”  from Skunk Talk 

Write it in your heart that every day is the best day of the year.
Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, breathe the wild air.
Finish each day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in;
forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day.
You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit
to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson from Collected Poems and Translations

She has done what she could…
~Mark 14:8

How do I start this gift of a new August summer day?

When sleep is elusive, the air too still and warm at midnight
When even a cloud-strewn sky looks dry
When wildfire smoke drifts in on waves from north and east, obscuring, rounding out the sharp edges

Yet I taste the sweetness offered this tepid summer morning,
unencumbered by my old over-thinking nonsense.

I’m here, present and accounted for, blessed by all I see.
I am doing what I can.
Let the day begin.

Even
After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth,

“You owe
Me.”

Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole
Sky.
~Daniel Ladinsky, from “The Gift”

Waking with the Light

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Light wakes us – there’s the sun
climbing the mountains’ rim, spilling across the valley,
finding our faces.
It is July,
between the hay and harvest,
a time at arm’s length from all other time,
the roads ragged with meadowsweet and mallow,
with splays of seedheads, slubbed and coarse, rough linen.
The fields above the house, clotted with sheep all spring,
are empty now and froth with flowering grasses,
still in the morning light. Birds move around
the leafy fields, the leafy garden.

It is the time
to set aside all vigil, good or ill,
to loosen the fixed gaze of our attention
as dandelions let seedlings to the wind.
Wake with the light.
Get up and go about the day and watch
its surfaces that brighten with the sun.

And later, when the light is drowsed and heavy
go find the burdened fruit trees where the shade
lies splashed and opened-out across the ground.
Spread over it a quilt worn soft by other bodies,
then curl and fall down into sleep at light.

Awaken to a world of long, loose grass-stems,
and leaves above,
and birds, breaking out of the leaves.
~Kerry Hardie from “Sleep in Summer”

Saying good-bye to July last week
meant admitting summer is already half-baked
and so are we–

we who are still doughy,
not nearly done enough.

The rush to autumn is breathless.
We want to hold on tight
to our longish days,
fall asleep in the grasses,
endure sweaty nights
for just a little while longer…

Please, oh please
grant us unending light
and steady us for the task
of getting ready for letting go.

A new series of summer photo notecards from our farm is now available as a thank you gift to you for your financial support of Barnstorming — details here

A Perfect World of Moments

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The evening comes slowly over us,
over the cardinal and the wren still
feeding, over the swallows suddenly
swooping to snatch up mosquitoes

over the marsh where the green
sedge lately has a tawny tinge
over two yearlings bending long
necks to nibble hillock bushes

finally separate from their doe
mother. A late hawk is circling
against the sky streaked lavender.
The breeze has quieted, vanished

into leaves that still stir a bit
like a cat turning round before
sleep. Distantly a car passes
and is gone. Night gradually

unrolls from the east where
the ocean slides up and down
the sand leaving seaweed tassels:
a perfect world for moments.
~Marge Piercy “June 15th, 8pm” from Made in Detroit

So many fleeting moments pass by me,
a shower of raindrops disappearing into a stream —
I can’t capture and hold them.
They run through my fingers like water,
leaving behind a damp residue of remembrance.

Yet each a moment of perfection,
even as I lose my grasp on it.
Perhaps a written word or recorded photo,
elusive as the relentless flow of time itself.

A moment gifted by God,
a moment breathed,
a moment observed,
a moment vanished,
lived fully, yet never to come again.