Birds and Flowers

Yesterday when we were out for a short drive by Medicine Lake, a flock of birds landed on the wires over the road. I didn’t have my camera along but Jon had his new Samsung smartphone. We headed to a nearby parking lot so that he could get his phone out and I could familiarize myself with it a bit. Then within just a couple of minutes we headed back to where the birds were lined up on the wires. Just as we approached they took to the air and then landed a bit to the east on the same wires.

Unfortunately it was a more difficult shot to make and with highway 169 on the other side of us there was nowhere for me to get out and make a better shot. So I zoomed in and made a shot anyway.

I’ve always been fascinated by

So today you get to see the birds on the wires, a test image I made with Jon’s phone and a whole bunch of amaryllis bud images. You might say that I am easily entertained. I just feel lucky that I get to see birds flying in the sky and flowers blooming even in the wintertime.

Birds just seem to have a kind of spiritual or symbolic weight. They feel somehow ancient or ethereal – timeless in a way, and I think poets are often attracted to things that have that sort of feeling.

— Traci Brimhall

In my searches for poems about birds I discovered poet, Traci Brimhall today. And though it is long, want to share this beautiful poem she wrote about wonder.

Oh Wonder

It’s the garden spider who eats her mistakes

at the end of day so she can billow in the lung

of night, dangling from an insecure branch

or caught on the coral spur of a dove’s foot

and sleep, her spinnerets trailing radials like

ungathered hair. It’s a million pound cumulus.

It’s the stratosphere, holding it, miraculous. It’s

a mammatus rolling her weight through dusk

waiting to unhook and shake free the hail.

Sometimes it’s so ordinary it escapes your notice—

pothos reaching for windows, ease of an avocado

slipping its skin. A porcelain boy with lamp-black

eyes told me most mammals have the same average

number of heartbeats in a lifetime. It is the mouse

engine that hums too hot to last. It is the blue whale’s

slow electricity—six pumps per minute is the way

to live centuries. I think it’s also the hummingbird

I saw in a video lifted off a cement floor by firefighters

and fed sugar water until she was again a tempest.

It wasn’t when my mother lay on the garage floor

and my brother lifted her while I tried to shout louder

than her sobs. But it was her heart, a washable ink.

It was her dark’s genius, how it moaned slow enough

to outlive her. It is the orca who pushes her dead calf

a thousand miles before she drops it or it falls apart.

And it is also when she plays with her pod the day

after. It is the night my son tugs at his pajama

collar and cries: The sad is so big I can’t get it all out,

and I behold him, astonished, his sadness as clean

and abundant as spring. His thunder-heart, a marvel

I refuse to invade with empathy. And outside, clouds

groan like gods, a garden spider consumes her home.

It’s knowing she can weave it tomorrow between

citrus leaves and earth. It’s her chamberless heart

cleaving the length of her body. It is lifting my son

into my lap to witness the birth of his grieving.

— Traci Brimhall