Tag: cardinal

Not Yet

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Morning of buttered toast;
of coffee, sweetened with milk.

Out of the window,
snow-spruces step from their cobwebs.
Flurry of chickadees, feeding then gone.
A single cardinal stipples an empty branch-
one maple leaf lifted back.

I turn my blessings like photographs into the light;
over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on:

Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken.
Not-yet-shattered, not-yet-sectioned,
not-yet-strewn.

Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love,
not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured, not-yet-
Not-yet-not.

I move my ear a little closer to that humming figure,
I ask him only to stay.

— Jane Hirshfield, “Not Yet” in “Come, Thief: Poems“. (HarperCollins, April 5, 2011)

Notes: Photo of Red Northern Cardinal on January 1, 2025 by DK at noon in backyard. Poem via having a poem with you.

Epicurus: “Those who eat together, stay together.”

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DK Photos: Cardinals Breaking Bread. 4:45 pm. April 28, 2024. Darien, CT

Sunday Morning

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Notes:

  • Photos: Northern Cardinals. May 23, 2022. Darien, CT
  • The real show was during my morning walk @ daybreak @ Calf Pasture Beach.  See photos here and here.

Unselfing

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Beauty, (Iris) Murdoch argues, gave us an opportunity for an “unselfing.” She writes:

I am looking out my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.

— Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty: A Memoir (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, April 5, 2022)

Notes:

  • Kestrel. Cardinal. Same. Shot taken of Red Cardinal overhead this morning @ 8 am in backyard.
  • Photos from Daybreak walk this morning here.

It hums, it throbs, it improvises.  So many voices. Only one song.

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breathe

A cardinal, the very essence of red, stabs
the hedgerow with his piercing notes;
a chickadee adds three short beats,
part of the percussion section, and a white-
throated sparrow moves the melody along…
And today, the sun, waiting for its cue,
comes out from the clouds for a short sweet
solo, then sits back down, rests between turns.
On the other side of the world, night’s black
bass fiddle rosins its bow, draws it over
the strings, resonates with the breath
of sleepers, animal, vegetable, human.
All the world breathes in, breathes out.
It hums, it throbs, it improvises.  So many voices.
Only one song.

~ Barbara Crooker, from “One Song. After Rumi” in Line Dance

Photo credit: via your eyes blaze out. Poem: Beyond the Fields We Know