How Will You Keep the Song Birds Safe?

I wish I could tell you that I have dwelt, all this time since I last wrote, beneath this tree, Buddha-like, contemplating a sutra.

But this would not be true.  I have been learning how to keep the song birds safe.

Specifically, I have been meeting wonderful poets and listening to them read their work in all manner of settings.  I have shared poems of my own.  In libraries, in barns, in small village groceries, in cozy living rooms.

I have learned that a secret underground of poetry is pulsing with quiet, ardent passion, beneath the terrible noise of our world today.  Sacred poems, truthful poems, urgent poems, healing poems.

Something is happening, something important.

Safe Feeding Practices:

People are reading others’ poems, sharing them, drawing hope and sanity from them in ways that little else in our word-clogged universe seems to be doing.
This is new for many of us in America, where for decades poetry has been the mandarin entertainment of the literati, and the rest of us trusted the nightly news and the morning paper.

Warding Off Predators:

Elsewhere across the globe, people have been much wiser for a very long time.  Russians, East Europeans, Israelis, Palestinians, and many of those who call the sub-continents home have long known that the truth must hide underground, far from the reaches of power, the glare of the podium.

Why Song Birds Matter for Local Ecosystems:

After this summer, I think that it is possible that we in America are entering a time when we are beginning to learn to hunt more skillfully, to seek the truth in unexpected places, for the real news without which, as William Carlos Williams famously wrote, “we die miserably every day.”

Where will you search for the truths that will carry you through? How will you keep the song bird in your own heart safe?

This week the sparrows make their way down through my part of New England on their southern migrations.  The song sparrows prefer to hide out in the thickets and privets along my lane, making the most gorgeous sound camouflaged as little brown leaves.

Hidden, they are safe, to forage, and to sing their hearts out.

Keeping Us Safe:

And so it is with poets.
In August, I attended a church service in a small, steepled, one-room chapel in northern New Hampshire.  A dear friend delivered the sermon, on the importance of mindfulness.

When it was over, the pianist who’d led us in hymns shared a precious bit of wisdom:

“Someone told me once that birds don’t sing unless they feel safe.”

Let us keep our world safe for poets, for all of the song birds in our hearts.

from Mending Prayer Rugs:

“Prayer Rug”

Each day I try to ply you
from the tools at hand,
a thread of hope, my failing eyes,
the night’s hungers.

I kneel in a dark kitchen
and watch the stove heat
a piece of sky caught in the pot of water,
pooling strands of saffron light.

Out in the garden something cold
and clear trills among the leaves.
A sweetness like spun silver
draws the birds from night.

I bend in blessing towards all that breathes:
May each hour enlarge the pattern —
rose dawn, wind song, tender shoot of faith —
that I may see the weft of the hidden weaver.