On my way back from Alabama, the birds were on their way wherever.
Their bodies, so many strewn in long lines across the sky, looked like
the words I wrote as a child before I knew how to write words.
I thought my thoughts would simply announce themselves to the page
if I pressed my pencil to it. And still, as I write this poem, I'm waiting
to see what I'm going to tell myself. The birds landed in an empty
field, gleaning for whatever it was they'd find. The clouds, so whipped
by wind, turned the sky a milky blue, pouring down fast and thick as paint
as I drove under it. There is so much missing in the world I try to write about:
I don't know what kind of birds or what had been planted or what to call
a cloud that does that. I'd like to say I don't need to know to love them,
but why else did I spend a lifetime looking for my name? I promise myself
I will look into it later so for now I look at their bodies, try to remember.
For now, a correction: the field was not an empty field. It was so full of birds.
Every human being has an obligation to return to this planet and to all its creatures the sound of beauty, the power of prayer, the sense of harmony. In O PIONEERS!, Willa Cather reminds us of our need to believe in the good soil of our lives, to do what we can to wake it up and then to wait.
"The land had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then all at once it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still."
We can learn the same lesson from sitting still with the land of the heart. It, too, has its little jokes. We think it is poor soil because we don't know how to work it. When we learn to do our inner work, it will wake up and work itself. All we need is a PATIENT WAITING and a TENDER ABIDING.