Retrospective #3: Thaw

Let the songs begin.

This poem “aired” almost exactly a year ago. Make it strike notes of true hope for you.

---

Funny to think about a thaw in a winter which has been shortish on the kind of cold necessary to freeze it all up real good. We humans have spent a couple of months pretty darn confused as the weather has toyed with our expectations, sending balmy warm air one day and knife-sharp northwinds the next. But the birds seem unfazed.

I don’t know what weather app they use, but it must be more reliable. I noticed them very little in March, while I watched my kids romp around in shorts one day and snowpants the next. I can always depend on the cardinal with the goofy backwards whistle (not cheer, cheer, whoop whoop, whoop but something like pwee? pwee? skew skew skew?). The occasional flit of juncos still hunts for leftovers in the prickly echinacea tops. But otherwise there wasn’t a whole lot of news in the world of winged ones.

I wrote the poem below quite a while ago and was not quite sure where it fit in the universe. But it came to mind the other day when it seemed like every beak in the district came unglued and a cacophony of song once again greeted me in the early mornings, along with the drip of melting ice in the gutters. So this one’s for the birds. My little song, in response.

Thaw 

Someone must have left the cages open at the zoo 
or the gangplank finally lowered from the ark. 
 
I passed a lone pheasant on the highway this morning 
and had to slow the car for two canada geese.

That was just the beginning, the airwaves are alive
with the news of more to come. Should we believe it? 

I pull over and kill the engine to a vast flood of song —
superfluous, exotic variations on the theme of yes.

It pulls my wary heart from its own ribcage, in the end, 
to see the starving robins go mad with unbridled joy.

they drift in like ghosts over islands of sunwarm earth 
and wrench out life at last, beaks muddied with the fight.