Month: February 2024

I stand on the back deck,
cradling my vigilant puppy.
This is our morning ritual—
looking down 
to the winter-buried gardens,
then across the river,
and over the snow-begowned hills, 
searching for deer, eagles, turkeys, 
squirrels, the lumbering possums
or leaping rabbits who live beneath the lower deck. 

Yesterday, the red-tailed hawk 
fired itself into the huddle of tender,
slender-tailed mourning doves 
gathered at the feeder,
coos and cries and feathers exploding 
as one of their own was carried off,
transforming from guest to meal,
from dove to hawk,
in an instant. 

Life turns and turns 
through such mysteries,
and we too may be so suddenly forced
to change roles, to die to another’s need, 
to explode like a star, or feathers,
into something unconsidered 
yet life-giving, our old self 
an offering, not to death,
but given as the price of passage
to strange new beginnings, 
startling connections and transmutations 
springing from our seeming end. 

Stardust and doves, hawks and beloveds, 
boulders and roses and oceans—
consuming, consumed: there is no death
but only, always, merging transformation,
and here we are,
flowering in different gardens, 
flying in unfamiliar skies. 

This morning, the doves 
swept away at our first steps, 
a hushed fluttering of linear flight
to their favorite mulberry tree, 
stringing themselves like prayer beads
across the bare branches, backlit 
by sunrise colors…

And I wondered what their prayer
or mine
would be: To avoid transformation, 
feed on our fears 
and the safety of sameness,
withholding the life 
we’re designed to offer?

Or to willingly meet 
our devouring hawk,
surrender
to the wild pain of translation
and,
reconfigured, 
flow to the next mystery beyond,
the infinite surprise 
of who we are and are becoming?

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