Migrations

Watching the geese
go south I find
that
even in silence
and even in stillness
and even in my home
alone
without a thought
or a movement
I am part
of a great migration
that will take me to another place.

It is the time of the great migrations;

wild winged ones fly in ragged formations
away from the summer fields of plenty,
down from the tundra, up from the tropics,
ordinary hearts beating against the winds,
resisting the updrafts, into the storms,
through the autumnal fogs that hide the hunters and the seductions of rest; wild finned ones turn against the familiar ocean currents to slip through narrow stony channels, leaping against the steepness of the grade, following an ancient invocation of leave and return. Fin and feather, flesh, blood and bone: the earth calls its creatures to leave the familiar, turn again into the unknown; to move steadily and continuously and at great risk toward an invisible goal, expending great energy with the possibility of failure; to live on migratory pathways into the future; the primal logic

of survival and regeneration, an ancient summons, nature’s pull against the grain, against all odds, against the reasonable and the safe; reconstituting the world.
-- Marianne Worcester

This morning they have
found me
full of faith
like a blind child,
nestled in their feathers,
following the great coast of the wind
to a home I cannot see.
-- David Whyte,
‘What I must tell myself’
The House of Belonging

Comments

[Amy Lenzo]

This is beautiful; thank you for posting it, Bob. And please thank Marianne for writing it...!