The Sandhills
by Linda Hogan
The language of cranes
we once were told
is the wind. The wind
is their method,
their current, the translated story
of life they write across the sky.
Millions of years
they have blown here
on ancestral longing,
their wings of wide arrival,
necks long, legs stretched out
above strands of earth
where they arrive
with the shine of water,
stories, interminable
language of exchanges
descended from the sky
and then they stand,
earth made only of crane
from bank to bank of the river
as far as you can see
the ancient story made new.
and so it happens, as it does, i come and look and spend time with these cranes, give attention. or is it lured from me, for it is more like being drawn into an equation of love. i can not look at them in this photo without being moved through a stupor, a gust of wind that is me that says, i love them... their necks! their wings! the proportions of their body which strike me as perfect. what is similar between them, buoys them. and what is different buoys them too.
ReplyDeletei am sent by way of connection to your poem about the raven, "It is stunning enough that the world makes a raven,/ incomprehensible that it makes this raven, with the broken/feather at the edge of its left wing,/the little gargling hitch halfway through its call." i think your poem is in conversation with hogan's, although your poem has a richer voice for me.
reading hogan's poem this morning... something happens to me which didn't happen before, some kind of dissolution... this morning her words move me beyond whatever isn't poetry into poetry. (but i'm not sure this would happen without your photo or your raven poem))))