And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell

                         and I understood more than I saw

                                           Black Elk

This evening, about dusk, suddenly there was pandemonium outside my window that is also a door . . . the raised voices of sparrows, doves and blackbirds, squirrels and rabbits, each in its way screaming the same panic, scurrying frantically for cover . . . and I knew what it was even before I opened the door and stepped out.

                                glints of light

                                  here and there in the trees

                                  blackbirds' beaks

The eagle I had seen but once before had returned.  It circled, dove twice, talons empty each time, and settled in a pine tree, a look less of despair than disdain, looking down at his hunger, so close I could almost reach out and touch him. 

                                 our old story

                                   coming to be told again

                                   across a thousand years

For a moment that will last forever, I could only watch, our eyes meeting for a few seconds in which neither he nor I could look away, a brief moment of recognition and affirmation as though we have always known of each other, and then he lifted into the air still filled with cries and flew off.  Panic slowly subsided and soon all was serene again, the birds and the earth-bound returning to their seeds and cracked corn and acorns; these creatures I feed and whose destiny, on another day, may be in turn to feed the eagle;  a destiny not so different in a way from my own in some dusk of final reckoning.   

                                stillness and silence

                                  then each different sound of rain

                                  on the wind chimes