Evensong
Through shaded open window drifts
The blackbird’s melodic evensong;
Floats across my stilled mind
Blanketing me as I rest
.
At dusk she sings when safe,
Her nest and world secure. Just
As my voice returns, to share in
Survival of another day
.
I listen to her celebration song
Call to fledglings, “I am here”
And here I lie, less sure than she
Of my woven launching pad
.
Dull shoulder ache a growing sign
That movement seeks to ease
Her insistence and perspective that
I can learn to fly on broken wing.
.
A lyric return to falling dusk
Dark a welcome embrace in which to range
When morning comes we will not be broken
Tumbling forth in ungovernable cacophony.
.
A gift in every serenaded sunrise
Flight plan and chorus untranslatable
Yet deeply felt, we are living.
Note by note, twig by twig.
.
Birdsong at Dusk
Sometime I find myself in the position where my thoughts thin out and I feel more connected to the world around me. It’s not exactly peace, it’s a bit like a more gentle form of exhaustion. Like I’ve finallly run out of things to think about or the energy to stoke the machine. It happened recently. I was lying in bed, the light still coming in through my pale blinds and the window open slightly. The Scottish evenings are long and I’m often in bed before darkness falls, my energy all used up by 9pm just on living.
In that space I became aware of how loud the birdsong was outside. It made me think about why they sing, and why I sing and write. They don’t sing like this when they are frightened, their alarm calls are something altogether different – raucous in their sharp urgency. The mocking call of the crow at Arthur in the garden who can’t resist the urge to bark and chase and protect his territory. This was different, a layered, unhurried sound that rose as the light softened. A communication across and beyond species. We made it through another day, I am here. We are okay.
As I lay listening I was aware of my body softening. That’s been happening more and more recently. My body arriving somewhere before my brain has caught up. I’ve spent a long time thinking I’m disconnected from it – preferring to live from the neck up, translating everything into language before I could trust it. But I’m starting to question this. I think my body has been talking all along but just in ways I haven’t known to listen for. It speaks in lyrics and song like the birds, and in the exact right words landing with a sort of physical relief, sometimes in tears arriving before a thought is finished.
And so this poem started to form, they come to me almost wholly – flying overhead and I have to catch them and write them down if I want to keep them. This one about why they sing, what it takes to feel safe enough to make music after a day of noise and fear and vigilance. And, as it does, my brain connects to songs already known. Without planning it was about broken wings.
Not the therapised – your wings were always strong enough, you just didn’t know it – sort of a way. Just a gentle acceptance that my wings genuinely are broken. There are limitations that I am always going to have to stop pretending don’t exist. In the Beatles song that fought for space in my consciousness that evening it’s not suggesting that they are to be healed – just use what you have. The question isn’t about whether flying is possible or not, birds fly. It’s the taking of them, permission to use what you have – given that brokenness is the given condition and not an obstacle to expanding your world view.
My son had left home to start on the next chapter of his life that day. The flying the nest analogy wasn’t a difficult one to make. When I hugged him goodbye I felt it in my body. Felt that the security and love I’ve held him in had actually landed, had been felt and had done what I always hoped it would do. Held and then free. It brought me back to the blackbird from my earlier poem Blackie. She was building a container to fill, trusting that it would be enough. And so have I – twig by twig.
When I thought about what happens after the night and the birdsong starts again the hymn Morning has Broken started to play in my head. But my mornings aren’t broken, they are whole and new and wondrous. They tumble forth from the dark, the birds singing before the light has fully arrived, my thoughts ranging and tripping over each other before my eyes open. But the signal is the same after the night. We made it, we are here, we begin again.
I don’t need to be able to understand the evensong or the dawn chorus, I don’t need to know where the birds go or when they come back and I don’t need to always have an explanation for why I feel the way I do in order to love and live fully and deeply. And I don’t need to connect to my body in the way that others do – just in the way that I do. In poetry, in music and quiet moments where I can just be.