EXCITED CROWS: A Series of Translations.
for you who inspire, revive the soul.
1.
As if to incite a riot,
crows call me out
for some daytime
experience they are sharing.
Do
they
sense
the
hints,
too,
all
around
of
this
summer's
final
end
and
this morning
with me
taste
autumn
approaching
in
the
wind?
. . . they are here
daring
me
to
lift
my
eyes
until only caw cawing
stays behind in earshot,
hints of autumn turning up edges of leaves
at
my
feet
in the fragile tattered yellows
of late summer mums and the hidden purple
uncovered
when I
stoop down
to see and catch
a glimpse
of the
tiniest
hues
of
wild violets moving in the clover,
and like a Trojan Horse,
lumbering along is a worm preparing
for the end of warmth; ignoring me, it is intent
on some other
place, a shell already of what it was.
II.
Yet with amazing force the worm manages to strike the bell of
my Achilles’ heel.
I feel like I am walking into a labyrinth
of seasons changing, face to face with time on the loose,
the eliptical path opens up before me like
a hundred times before, yet the door into
this unknown cackle crow caw day is one I never
lived into before now; what the crows
say flying like arching arrows above the farm pond with voices
higher pitched
than the silent windless pines
and what the purple flowers
ask
me to bend my ear down
to hear
is such a mystery,
unfolding in a single revelation.
I now know something after 56 years about seasons.
III.
I do not speak Crow,
or Cherokee,
or Navajo and
(I am one-fifth filled by the river of Cherokee blood) but
I still sometimes feel my Shaman nature
rising
like
a
crow
caw caw
or
dove coo coo,
seeing what is both priestly and mundane
when the sweeping wind of a crane
passes by
in a whisper of gliding gray wings
touching my heart with a memory-
the first time I ever saw
a watery loon,
pelican, sand piper,
and seagull, and heard the conch shell play their
tune . . . standing near me
on the vast late summer shore are my mother,
father, brother, and sister
all as amazed as I dumb
struck by the beauty of all that lives
and rises from the sea - - -
IV.
With arms folded like closed wings,
I masked my
birdy shaman nature for many
years until
love
broke
me
down - - -
stripped me
bare to the
thorny
bone
and then, only then, when I was no more than
skeleton fluttering like a prayer flag in the breeze,
God came and
breathed new
flesh to life
in me again
--- and like magic,
I
became a
living
thing
rising
from
the
sea
.
.
.
.
only this was no mere
magician alchemy;
this was worm to embattled butterfly
metamorphosis, and after all this time
the time to fall sleep has come again,
baffling as the bruises left by the ones passing on ahead of me
leaving me to catch up.
Making me retrace my steps from the sea to the inland South
to the wandering
leaves trembling in their weight waiting for the right wind
to blow them off on colorful wings
in all five directions.
To give them a taste of the ephemeral.
But I have decided to stay put for a while longer
and ponder what I have seen this morning
and what I hear after baffles me.
V.
What I hear this morning is a lesson
from the crows who return now, one after the other
from the hasty retreat at the sight of some
towering presence on the scene,
and
noisier than before,
back at the place it all started,
they teach a stranger to their mother tongue
the
ropes, so I set my mind to work on deciphering
codes of promise and decoding autumn’s answers
back this year in
late summer voices, coming again
in tints of happiness, in hints of seasoned joy soon to
take another turn away from gladness,
as fortunes
have
their final end in grandness
as leaves begin to fall, faithfully,
and what lives now
pilgrimages toward the turning and burning
hues changed to
bronze and rouge and mothy brown . . . wearing
silhouettes of gods and goddesses, priests
and priestesses, goblins and ghosts,
all transformed in
harvest fires rising
their
smokey
blues and yellows
and oranges rising into
the long cool
nights
jeweled with Jupiter and Mars
and into the sphere of
a
full
moon
never seen so fully clothed with sky
until
now - - -
and after all is lived, I turn into a Shaman witness
to the eternal in a purple flower,
a rugged yellowed butterfly, dragging myself along,
and a crow song,
translated.
copyright 2010 chaz hill
No comments:
Post a Comment