Birds
Part of ‘Sunlight Later’
The branches above are breaking into the sky —
as birds like ink on air swirl from trees to flight
great black lungfuls of them freewheeling across
the white winter sky, humming the secret rhythm
of fragment to solid, then loosening into dance.
Look up.
I wonder what it is in me that still fears my light
turning instead to the sharp inhale of darkness —
and I keep thinking: don’t let me mess this up
me, with my gaze skewed down to tangled ground
missing this quiet kindness, this wild mess, this show.
Be still.
The sky is still mine if I want it
the ground doesn’t care if I’m a poet or a mother
the birds don’t care if the words fly out of me
or fester on vein branches in my mind
waiting for the perfect moment to be set free.
Let go.
Fear comes when you have something to lose.
Once, I was a puffin on a cliff-face, a hedgehog in a thicket,
a terrapin watching shadows blur on faces in the morning sun.
Once, I was the white on the wave and the notes on a piano
playing until the dark in my heart became a song taking flight.
Under the light of a single star, I waited blindly
for the call, for the hair-breath moment of arriving
looking at the light for the first time shining —
and a mother not sure if her child had survived.
Once, I squeezed through a star-hole to be here,
once, I hopscotched across the dark glass sky
to claim my name, once I was the wind and the light
riding hidden eddies to a freedom I didn’t know was mine.
Once, I counted tears until they became stars in the sky —
or poems: blossoming, or birds: laughing.
Take flight.
An extra note
This poem grew out of the quiet but continual tug-of-war between the part of me that sinks and the part of me that wants to rise. It’s about living with the shadow of depression, about the heaviness we carry without meaning to, and the strange tenderness that arrives when we stop wrestling with ourselves long enough to simply notice the world around us. This theme of noticing is one that emerges through a lot of my poems: some would call it mindfulness, but as many mindfulness courses and practices as I’ve tried, I’ve always found myself to be the same prickly and impatient version of myself. Noticing, somehow, feels easier.
I remember the day I wrote this — I was about to pick up my youngest daughter from daycare, and I was involved in some new negative spiral in my head (about something inconsequential, no doubt) and looking at the ground where I walked. Then out of the corner of my eye I caught the most amazing sight — a murmuration of starlings freewheeling across the sky. It jolted me back in to the absolute miracle that we are even here at all (‘once I squeezed through a star-hole to be here’), and that there’s this incredible, majestic show happening all around us, all the time, if we allow ourselves to notice it. I remember actually whispering under my breath ‘don’t fuck this up’ as I thought about the blessings I had been given (‘fear comes when you have something to lose’) and the fact that all the tangles about identity and purpose don’t, in the end, actually matter or define the whole of us (‘the birds don’t care if the words fly out of me / or fester on vein branches in my mind / waiting for the perfect moment to be set free.’) What matters is the sense of larger belonging, the wider sky, waiting for us outside the confines of our mind’s tight and tiny rooms.
This poem is me reminding myself to look up, to be still, to let go — and to trust that in doing so, something in me might finally take flight.
(P.S I’m aware this photo is of pesky seagulls and not murmurating (?!) starlings. But I’m trying hard to only use my own photos, and I didn’t get the starlings. Which is a good sign - I was too busy watching them ;))