Barnstorming

For to come upon warblers in early May was to forget time and death.—Theodore Roethke

Every poem of death        
should start
with my mother’s love        
for birds.
Finches and waxwings        
her favorites,
though she wasn’t        
one to quibble;
an eagle dragging a carp        
across the sky
would do.

There are worse things        
than being dead.
You might be swallowed   
by the daily minutia
of the great mundane,        
to be spit up
years later        
wondering where
your life has gone.

But loving something        
can save you:
the way finches        
stack a feeder,
meddle in each other’s        
business until
a woodpecker crashes in,       
littering surrounding
shrubs with wings.

Last summer my wife        
found a hummingbird
on Mount Pisgah.        
Its emerald wings trembled
as its feet tried to grasp        
her fingers.
A ranger said        
that their lives
are so short anyway.        
What a curious reply,
I thought, but later        
reconsidered.
Perhaps any time       
 being a hummingbird
is enough.
~Bill Brown “With the Help of Birds”

That long-ago morning at Ruth’s farm
when I hid in the wisteria
and watched hummingbirds. I thought
the ruby or gold that gleamed on their throats
was the honeyed blood of flowers.
They would stick their piercing beaks
into a crown of petals until their heads
disappeared. The blossoms blurred into wings,
and the breathing I heard
was the thin, moving stems of wisteria.
That night, my face pressed against the window,
I looked out into the dark
where the moon drowned in the willows
by the pond. My heart, bloodstone,
turned. That long night, the farm,
those jeweled birds, all these gone years.
The horses standing quiet and huge
in the moon-crossing blackness.
~Joseph Stroud “First Song”

Birds are everywhere this time of year – I keep my phone handy with the Merlin App open from Cornell Lab, so I know who I’m hearing.
From the robins and sparrows, to warblers and thrushes, along with the chittering bald eagles nesting by the pond across the road, it is quite a symphony to witness in the early morning and at sunset.

The app even tries to identify a woodpecker’s rapping and a hummingbird’s buzz.

There was a time not long ago when I was too busy with daily details to pay much attention to the awesome variety of creatures around me.

Once it hit me what I was missing, I started watching, listening and being part of all this life rather than wondering too late where life had gone.

How sobering one day to find a hummingbird dead in the dirt,
once a dear little bird of motor and constant motion,
lying stilled and silenced
as if simply dropped from the sky,
a wee bit of fluff and stardust.

Then a friend pointed out a hummingbird nest high in a tree.
And so it is the way of things…

We are here and gone.
Beauty hatched, grown and flown, then grounded.
…but not forgotten.