Words are Birds

Her words were light as feathers
               from Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's Odyssey

Words are birds--

Sometimes brash as starlings
moving in beneath the eaves of your house without asking--

Or melancholy as mourning doves whistling,
 perched overhead on telephone wires--

Or quick as bright hummingbirds
darting madcap among the trumpet vines--

Or harsh as a murder of crows,
their raucous conversation splitting open the morning air--

Or pleasing as a lark, singing solo to no one
and everyone in a mountain's meadow--

I have no favorites.
Let them all come home to roost with me.

Depression.2

This is rough country,
Not fit for grazing horses and not spacious
But not infertile.
                   from Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's Odyssey

This space between well and unwell
where I reside in the months
when the light goes low is rough country.

All I can do is stand by the gate
and wait until the light lifts at last so
I can find my way forward to fertile ground.

An Invitation

"And where can I go wandering?"
                from Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's Odyssey

Come wander with me, oh Reader, and
I will take you through the winding streets
of my own mind where I promise
you'll meet the people who live there,
leaning inside doorframes and hanging
over balconies strewn with flowers,
telling each other stories as another day
rises pink and orange on the back of the sun.

Stranger

Meanwhile Odysseus, who had been sleeping
in his own native land of Ithaca
woke up, but did not recognize the place . . . "
             --from Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's Odyssey

See your friend there?
She looks much the same as
she has always looked to you--
small and fine-boned as the birds that
swirl in the tree between your houses.

For years you two have shared that tree
and more--stories of your
children and your husbands
and all the things, dark and light,
that have filtered through your hearts.

But she is changed now, touched by an illness
that is touching her mind
so that being with her as the day unfolds
is like waking up a stranger in
the place that used to be your home.

A Writer's Prayer

These words—they have been 

Whistling like birds in me

And around me and through me

Ever since that month, that week,

That day, that morning, that moment

When I saw a windhover hover against

An open sky above an open field

And time past and time present 

Fell together and gave birth

To a fledging hope that 

I could take that moment

And give it time future--

A new life between the pages of a book.

This is a prayer to give wings to my hope.

Here

Sitting now in a chair on a deck
in a land far, far away--
(How far, you ask?
Let's just say I can see
a volcano, its cheeks full of smoke,
from my host's front porch)--
I can hear these sounds:
The splash of a courtyard fountain--
The raving of roosters
although dawn is long gone--
The pop pop pop of fireworks nearby--
The banging of hammers
against metal and wood--
The roiling of wind through the trees--
The trill of small birds
hiding in leafy places--
The howls of a mixed dog chorus--
The blurred buenos tardes chanted
through a megaphone in the village below.
What is all of this here, right here,
if not music in the moment?

Bloom

Pink dawn rolled down
the mountain this morning
like a loose armful of peonies--
a reminder that dreams of
May push up through fields
of snow and bloom anyway.

Prayer for a Winter's Evening

Please help me to love this

season of cold and snow.

Help me to see the beauty of

bare branches, hard and slim and dark--

Of stiff wheat-colored grasses

draped in white and sparkled ice--

Of a chilled pink moon rising steady

Over the crest of a powdered mountain.

Or

If I can't see these things

and sing praise, then

please let me thank this 

season of cold and snow

for giving and giving away

to the riot of daffodils

that follows.