May 11, Columbine
Almanac for Post Moderns
Witness with a start a Coopers Hawk tuck into a quick slipstream after a Redwinged Blackbird. Silent, but not so, with brush of wind at wing tip. Witness this, and feel the soft lower back of a woman who 23 years ago gave birth to a boy: Mother’s Day.
The trail of continual birth. The trial of continual mitosis; a split cell holding more water, more hunger, more ceremony casting about on a 15 knot wind — ‘til it gets fast away.
Tucked into this slipstream, in the shelter of its own plain call, a Phoebe calls “Phoe-Bee”. Here to stay a while and then gone — she too a daughter of Gaia, the still-lingering mother of all this, all that, all moons. If in fact we can still say moon with certainty.
With all this, the mother whose hands still yearn, no, whose cells call to her hands, as core to tip, plants Columbine today — an inverted, suspended heart with stamen in shade. As in shade and bright as this land, this place within transient country, birth, life, the suspended caw or chatter of a different Columbine.
