December Geese | Ralph Monday
The song of migrating geese spilled from the sky.
Upward they soared under moody December skies,
Flying in a great V as if symbiotically linked by
The vast natural forces that had shaped them over
Millennia, the way that natural law molds and
Forms rock, the geese and the stone in an inconceivable
Distant time elementally birthed in the heart of a savage
Star.
The physics of life pulses through them as through me,
And I felt an ancient shudder pierce my being, timeless,
As their unity joined and patterned an experience split
Open and reformed instantly in my coursing blood, and
Those air travelers prodded on by what mysterious,
Unknown instinct touched me, bound to earth, and I
Envied their freedom while all the while realizing that
Freedom is not in the strident whish of beating wings,
Contained rather in an unencumbered heart that
Instinctively knows both sky and earth, fire and water.
All experience is linked, as the lesson of the flying
Birds taught, and once the heart is set adrift from its
Moors, no compass is sufficient enough to guide it
Back to the original port, and in that epiphany, I
Dreamed, like the geese, of flying to you.
—
Ralph Monday has had over 200 poems published in literary journals and online literary sites. A chapbook, All American Girls and Other Poems was recently published, and a book Lost Houses and American Renditions is forthcoming from Hen House Press.
