After A Quiet Night

 

The birds make their nests in circles
For theirs is the same religion as ours

      Black Elk

 

  

This morning the geese return, two and threes,

A few for the first time, some perhaps the last,

Their calls reaching the two ponds first and then

They waver out of the first low light and the last

Of the dark rain clouds that stayed the night

And now moving on over the fields and leaving

Nothing here to say they had ever been there.

 

Geese are graceful in air but not artful leaving

It for water, trying to walk on it as they splash

And almost sink like stones skipping across the

Ripples they make, then settling into grace again,

Gathering and voluble now, but tonight they will 

Drift off into the silence of their separate sleep, 

The ponds settling too into their old reflections.





Poetry by countryfog
Read 651 times
Written on 2015-04-01 at 17:18

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Lawrence Beck The PoetBay support member heart!
Well done, Fog. This is wonderfully vivid. We see what you saw.
2015-04-01


josephus The PoetBay support member heart!
Our geese her have mutated into a subspecies that doesn't migrate. Their familiarity and nuisance have caused folks here to view them as irritants rather than muses as you have so well. Maybe if they left and returned like their more adventurous cousins, they would be taken with more delight and less regret.
2015-04-01



I used to think that there was no sadder sound, none more lonesome, than the honking of geese either leaving or returning. The only sound sadder than the sound of a far-away train whistle.

Why, I couldn't say. Maybe because they awakened my nomadic nature, making me restless and feeling much too anchored.

Anyway, lovely meditations on the nature of wild birds and their grace (and sometimes lack of it).
2015-04-01