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.
Beautiful! I made a wish that my grandparents would be reincarnated. Dewey and Vergia Havens, from back home in Kentucky. I loved them so much when I was a kid. My wish was granted when I saw a pair of cardinals, a bright crimson male and a mushroom colored female, perched in the Chinese elm tree near our backyard feeder. I remember my grandmother putting out food for the cardinals in a feeder on the hillside behind their house. So when I saw the pair of cardinals in our backyard, I knew my grandparents had come back to visit me.
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Shelby
How beautiful, powerful, earthy, visceral. The kind of poetry that I love the most, commingling desire and sadness. Coming down to earth, into full awareness of feelings and memories. Now, as I hold the news of my mother's third cancer, I, too, come down to Earth like Atlas, to draw strength from it, courage from surrender. Thank you, and may you write many more.
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