It's that time of the rolling year:
The Winter Solstice.
This year's poem came from several encounters with a roaming band of wild turkeys in the neighborhood, who have been roosting in several huge trees near a local park.
The poem continues with the themes of the last several winter solstice poems posted here: the darkest day of the year evoking underworld images, shape-shifting, things moving into hibernation, into a dream-like state.
In the poem below there is a reference to "graylings". This is the name Michaela and I have given to Bush Tits because that name is just awful and doesn't do them justice.
This poem, like most winter solstice poems posted here in years past, is a work in progress. It will be one of the final poems in a finished manuscript called "The Solstice Book."
Winter Solstice: What Calls
1.
Moss spreads across the sidewalk,
drawn out of the concrete by mist
that slips between bare oak branches,
shifts pines, firs, into afterlife shades.
The smell of root-thread and worm-
skin, bark-ridge and lichen, moves
around us, and we are led on by musk
and amber, clinging to the underside
of stones settling deep into damp
ground.
2.
Graylings move through a Japanese
maple, sound the street with busy
chatter, fly bare tree to bare tree, east,
leading us deeper into the mist. They
gather low in a pine near the park.
Their voices filter down through dark
needles; tiny messages: ambiguous,
contradictory. Go this way…No, go
that way…Stay…Stop before it’s too
late…there is something ahead...
3.
Sixteen wild turkeys mill in wet park
grass. One leaps onto a nearby chain
link fence. A figure appears at a win-
dow, stares at the greatbird as it lifts,
flaps onto the roof. We breathe in
mist, watch it slow-step along the apex
of the roof toward the dark silhouette
of a one-hundred-foot fir. We exhale
mist. The other birds slowly follow
the first.
4.
Across the park field, trees merge,
become vague ships, church spires
of an obscure religion whose founder
claimed to converse with birds, trees,
stones, claiming to be the human
dead; doors long ago fallen off their
hinges, followers too old to stop
the decay. Turkey heads lift to the fir,
fulfilling a bird prophecy about arriv-
ing here at this precise moment.
5.
Everything in the park shifts form,
becomes a shade of itself, moves in
and out of an after or pre-life. What
are we before the face, the heart,
the wing? One turkey lifts off the roof,
into the fir. Dark wings enter an inner
complex of dark branches. Another
opens its wings, flies towards the crown.
What are we after the face, the heart,
the wing?
6.
We stand in the middle of the street,
stare up at the fir. Turkeys settle deep,
high inside the tree: trick-shadows of
distant ancestors we never knew, or of
those we loved, now long gone. What
called us here? The birds become still,
merge with the tree. The tree merges
with fog. We merge with the dark scent
of the sea hidden inside each molecule
of water drifting through us.
*********************************************
Have a strange and mysterious solstice!
Posts from Winter Solstice's past:
2016: Midway Through Life's Journey: Winter Solstice Poem2018: Hope, Courage, Mercy
2019: Labyrinths
2020: The Space Between
2021: Snow-clouds
2022: Tidepool
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