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.”
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