Tag: geese

Migrants

Photo by Nadine Giza on Pexels.com

They will be here soon
flying through the night
piercing the muffled silence
as stars punctuate darkness’s depths.
They are coming,
converging,
greeting each other,
flying alongside and ahead.

Battalions with no borders to defend
no wars to fight
no points to score.

To the stirring fields of autumn
to the flat black water
to the margins,
they approach.

Let’s meet them there.

I was on a bus between Perth and Edinburgh last week. As it swung into Kinross to pick up passengers, I glanced up at the amazing Kinross Gateway sculpture of three pink-footed geese alighting (David F. Wilson, https://dfwilson.co.uk/1371-2/). I thought, ah yes, the pink-foots. They’ll be on their way now. In my mind I could see them sweeping the skies, could hear their incessant babbling on the wind. The poem above got written before the bus had even got to Kelty. By the time I go to the end of it, I wasn’t only writing about geese. The last line references a famous poem by the 12th century Persian Sufi poet, Rumi, which goes like this:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.”

Circular Walk, Spring Morning

A night of light snow, followed by clear-sky freezing has left
The ground hard and white.
Rapidly the sun, heroic, overcoming all, climbing high,
Melts snow to iridescence at every margin, every edge.

On a single hill, snow is held in thrall. Like a crumpled Mount Fuji, but
No blossom, no art,
The hill holds its ghost-clothes, despite the sun’s triumphal progress.
Magisterial old beeches sun themselves among old walls and
Moss-covered stones, dripping, wet, full of temptation.

Birds call, fluting, piping, chameleon-coloured, slipping away like lizards.

I’ve never understood the detritus of forestry. The wind cuts and dives
In and out of the shambles of stumps and trenches, where startled pines left behind
Look half-naked and vulnerable, hesitantly beginning to stretch arms to the sky,
To each other, united in the icy wind.

I follow the wind. I leave the wreckage, the small shelter
Of self-seeded spruce erupting from glossy gorse and broom. Ahead
A vast and dreary vista of huge, brown and empty fields,
Unpunctuated by tree or hedge-bank, meticulously ploughed and harrowed.
The dust rises, faintly reeking still of the abattoir, that small, derisory recompense
For decades of soil inevitably lost and life precluded.

Back by road, the first wood anemones
In the deep and shady gulf where children once played canyons,
And a rising stir of sound comes up from behind. Suddenly
A thousand geese are shifting and snaking in the blue, blue sky,
Withering the last frost with their joy.