Category: Poetry

Northern Mockingbird

Here’s the final part of the Northern Birds of South Carolina trilogy. I encounter the Northern Crow, Northern Cardinal, and Northern Mockingbird each day here in the piedmont of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and they always have something to teach me.

Northern Mockingbird

In the hush just before morning,
he perches above the old creek,
a plain gray cipher, alert in the fog,
summoning every sound the watershed has ever uttered.

He is the weaver of other voices:
the high whistle of the hawk,
the rattle of hub city train tracks,
the hymn fragments that once drifted from clapboard churches,
even the keening of a lost child calling for home.

Here in the Blue Ridge, they say
he was made by the Creator to keep watch,
not just to sing,
but to recall all that is spoken and unspoken,
to give shape to the inarticulate ache of mountains
who know they are ancient but cannot say so themselves.

I once thought of mockery as scorn,
the cheap imitation of what is true.
But he teaches me another meaning:
that to echo is to bear witness,
to catch the echo of what matters and make it linger,
to gather up the lost notes,
the sigh of a dying ash,
the wild laughter of children,
the whispered prayers that never found an altar.

Some say the mockingbird is a trickster,
Hermes with a Southern drawl,
but I see a priest in plain feathers,
administering the liturgy of memory,
baptizing the day with a polyphony
only he can conjure.

What is revelation but the repetition
of what we have forgotten?
Isn’t this the task of the faithful,
not to invent, but to remember,
to sing back the world to itself until
even God might hear it again,
and call it good?

He stands in the half-light,
not red like fire, nor black like the secret,
but a vessel for all colors,
the fullness of sound and shadow.
In his song I hear the crow’s wisdom,
the cardinal’s blaze,
and something more:
the promise that every borrowed voice
can become a prayer
when given with intention.

By dawn, I find myself singing too,
not my own song,
but fragments stitched together
from ancestors, wild earth,
and whatever holy silence
will let me listen.

The mockingbird does not mock,
he remembers.
He calls forth what the world has spoken
and lets it live again
as hope in the air
above a waking world.

Northern Cardinal

He appears, a flash of red
against the gray-branched sorrow of late spring,
not summoned, not prayed for,
but suddenly here, as if the world’s liturgy
required a single, burning presence.

His song is an ordinal, notes rising like incense
through the hush of my morning litany.
I remember how the grandfathers spoke of angels in disguise,
and how every sparrow counts,
but the cardinal is no messenger.
He is the message,
blood-bright and unapologetic
in the ruins of what I thought was ordinary.

I pause, mid-step, boots sinking into mud and leaf mold,
and let my catechism falter:
If every creature is a word of God,
what language does he speak
when he flares his crest, flings his voice
across the ravine of silence between us?

I think of the psalms,
the trees clapping their hands,
the stones crying out,
the heavens declaring, but here
on this cool fence post, it is enough
that red exists, incandescent,
in the waning light.

There is something Eucharistic about him:
how he breaks the dullness open
with his body, how he makes the sacrament
not of bread but of being,
the wild, pulsing glory
of being here,
now,
in this battered world.

I want to confess to him
my small faith,
my brittle hopes,
my longing for resurrection that comes
not as thunder, but as color
in the middle of the woods.

He cocks his head
unconcerned with theology,
yet radiating the kind of grace
that leaves a mark,
that stays in the body like a refrain.

In his departure,
I hear nothing but my own breathing,
a little steadier,
my heart echoing
some silent, ancient amen,
the red in the gray,
the promise of return,
the gospel of this world.

Northern Crow

Along the margin where the asphalt fails
and wild sumac rises,
the crow walks, black-lit and watchful,
a silhouette feathered by histories I barely remember.

His eyes, polished stones, regard
the world with the patience of a thing
that has already lost so much,
that expects nothing but cold wind
and the promise of old bones beneath the leaves.

He knows the taste of November’s first rot,
the hush of frost just before dawn
when the world holds its breath.
He forages among the offerings;
rusted keys, shattered acorns,
fragments of an unsaid prayer
left behind by children or priests.

I remember something Thomas Berry wrote,
about the necessary darkness,
how death, in the webbed roots of things,
becomes soil, becomes future,
becomes the cry of crow at daybreak.

He is not above or below me,
he is kin in the loosest sense,
stranger and prophet,
who gathers what is broken
and makes it part of his living.

Sometimes, when I walk the boundaries of my own heart,
I feel his shadow pass, a brush of wing,
a reminder that nothing is truly wasted,
not even sorrow, not even longing.

Under a sky bruised by the ache of dusk,
he lifts his voice, not as lament,
but as invitation, a way to say;
Even now, the world is not finished.
Even now, something unnamed and winged
waits to be born from what is left behind.

The Season

You puzzled me with refraction, your mysterious guise,

(bending your hair in light, like corn under windy skies).

A shimmering illusion, a trick of the dawn’s early gleam,

causing me to look the wrong way, lost in a dream.

Your essence, like an underground stream, flowed unseen,

for your root cause, I plowed the field, yet it remained pristine.

In earth’s quiet wisdom, the truth lay untold,

my furrowed brow mirrored the furrowed fold.

You spoke to me from heaven, from the vast cerulean expanse,

(and I looked down) in the soil, seeking your dance.

Your voice in the wind rustling the autumn leaves,

in the silence of the winter, in the spring that deceives.

In the bounty of summer, under the sun’s searing gaze,

your riddles whispered in the crackle of the maize.

You answered me in riddles and caused me to drive onto the rocks,

like a wayward vessel tossed by the unyielding equinox.

But in the turned earth, in the seed’s silent plea,

I found your truth, in the cycles of a bountiful tree.

Roots deep in the Pee Dee, branches reaching for the light,

You puzzled, spoke and answered, in the day and in the night.

In the seasons’ eternal riddle, in the plow’s steadfast toil,

I found you not in heaven, but in the humble soil.

Daffodils by Ted Hughes

Daffodils in Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters is one of those poems that always cuts me deeply. The rusted cross at the end. Whew.

I once had a beloved Siberian Huskey I found on a hot summer morning while attempting to jog before the sun got too high in Columbia, SC. It is hot on the pavement in Columbia in the summer. This poor pup met me with her bright blue eyes and looked through me asking me to take her somewhere.

How could I resist?

She lived with me for years and became a trusted partner even on her three legs after her cancer forced an amputation. I named her Sylvia after Sylvia Plath. I still think of her often.

Hughes’ Birthday Letters is a collection of thoughts on his wife Sylvia who took her life in 1963. It’s a jarring and penetrating and altogether emotional collection. Daffodils here is one of my favorites.

Daffodils by Ted Hughes – The American Scholar

The World is Too Much With Us

Iambic pentameter courtesy of Petrarch still rings true…

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

William Wordsworth

Maya Angelou’s Partnership with Hallmark

I’d forgotten about this completely… fascinating read:

Billy Collins, then U.S. Poet Laureate and a fellow Random House writer, questioned Angelou’s partnership with Hallmark, the largest manufacturer of greeting cards in the United States and, among the literati, commonly associated with trite expressions.

“It lowers the understanding of what poetry actually can do,” Collins said to the Associated Press. “Hallmark cards has always been a common phrase to describe verse that is really less than poetry because it is sentimental and unoriginal.”

Source: Why Maya Angelou Partnered with Hallmark | The National Endowment for the Humanities

Dereliction

Crescendo of conspiracy until the mounting
Of evidence with harm accumulates on the back.

The Redbird creeks on a branch feeding
In the ice rain over a frozen land finished with white.

Glass covered floors in the palace of Ithaca wetting
The tile with a strange homecoming of fire and blood.

A nostos for the Cunning to a land forgetting
And has forgotten his words and deeds.

The one much prayed for by those in a sardonic mood smiling
The epithets of an ice-frozen heart and spear.

With Polyphemus as his guide and a bag of wind blowing
To take them home to a land for Nobody.

The Two-Headed Turtle resting
On the potions of Hermès to escape the magic of memory.

Only Argos remembers him and joins his standing
In the broken palace that brings libel to the song.

The Cunning beat their chest and sing songs while limping
Away on the promises of an afterlife inside the palace door.