Category Archives: bird

Before and After

Go at the end of the day. Not at the end of the light, but when everyone else journey’s home. Go and plant your feet in the sand, stand against the breeze with the grey gulls. Breath in the ocean, on your own, in gentle solitude. Step out of time, hold ancient weathered pottery in the palm of your hand. Harvest fragments of wood carved by the sea, fill your pockets with lost feathers. Follow scattered trails of birds footprints, forage in tumbling scribbles of seaweed.

Go at the start of the day, when everyone else is still sleeping. Fill your eyes with soft dawn light, or the blazing awakenings of the sun. Bathe in bird song, come eye to eye with raptors. Breath in the rising smell of the earth, of blossoming hedgerows. Be silent and distantly present, hold your breath to catch a glimpse of resting deer. Holding their gaze just for a moment. Glimpse sun catcher dewy golden threads of spider’s webs, while a ghost of the moon floats in the sky. Sail through soft shadows split by fresh light. Carry the wind, the mist, spring rain on your skin into the day.

Forgotten

I forgot the blackbirds song. I heard it, beautiful and precise, repeating a crystal clear fragment of a melody. Singing it back, I thought it would stay in my head. High up on the telegraph pole, the top of a totem, perched against the dawn. Perfect black, delicate and bold, swooping, carving through the hedgerow. He kept his call. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow I will return. His melody had been replaced with the siren calls of invisible skylarks. Darting sounds in the air. The pheasants klaxon cutting the mist, distant green woodpecker, a single magpies chatter. All the other voices, a scattered chorus through the fields.