Why do they leave?
Gazing skyward
listening
in fall the settled beings
near warm wet prairies
celebrate the return.
Prodigal cranes
arrive in raucous gray arrows
aimed toward wetland forage
easier living.
They preen and dance
among their lesser relations,
lesser sandhill cranes,
Florida sandhills.
Those who stayed
dressing their feathers with Florida soils
until rooted.
Who each Spring
watch their robust cousins
lift and carry winter’s slate gray skies North.
Spirits returning to the beginning,
the refrain.
In the echo of their parting revelry
the promise to return.
Why do they leave?
My dead do not return
the curtain between us
is drawn down tight
Spring and Fall.
My dead do not return
but for moments--
a face, glimpsed and lost, a touch, a flash of memory, a story told.
Father’s ashes. Mother’s ashes,
churned in tides
and washed on different shores
meeting in falling castles
and cradling plover eggs.
Brother’s breath. Sister’s breath
held
exhaled into flight
a jagged gray arrow
tinged with blood
finding home.
