The Enchantment of Birds

A walk through the woods at the back of the house on a new spring morning with winter yet to fully retreat.

Winter green, showing dark in morning haze of fractured warmth

Of tall shadows cast in absence of light upon empty air

Of ephemeral breezes that dusk among bough arched halls

Where light glanced threads stitch the ground and make joyful a prison of twined trees

Who fall in ungainly ranks that dress on, innumerable and innominate

With needles to splinter the clustered light for the specklings of dust that show it off

 

All is a prelude to the more timid green of spring

 

Sails of new hope dawning carry each restless stride

From leaf brown shore to moss green isle and on some feral bearing

That tacks its way in the gentle company of ‘nothing much to do’ and ‘everything to see’

The passage continues, into the deep green of fir woods

Through sun wrought mists to an end

An end that is not ‘yet’ or ‘now’ or even ‘soon to be’

And so in looking, through the miles of absent time

Between this living slope and that, shown in clearest motion

The perfection of what is

 

This thing, this all in the enchantment of birds