Feathers

"Crow(s) may communicate to you through leaving feathers for you to find.
These serve as a reminder of your connection to spirit or that it is time for you to be still to enable a message from spirit to come through" ...Anon

Waking Up Strange

Sometimes I am a stranger to myself,
In my home, in my place, in:
This body, it seems so familiar, how do I know you?
The sun, does it always feel like this, hot like solstice?
The wind, do I recognize that sound in the tree tops
It seems too loud as it curves from branch to ground.
And my friends, who once seemed so well defined now
Bear the off look, slightly foreign and out of focus,
As they have carried on so famously while I have
Over slept, missed the bus, or forgot the key.
Is it them or is it me?
Like Watson, the computer
Who won on Jeopardy, but didn’t get
The Joke
Who was grandly intelligent yet lacked the nuance
Of what it means to be human ?
These things that might be learned but not easily granted
And need random renewal, without any certain date stamped upon
The card, the expired password, the plaintive expression
Which seems to crumble into desert dust.
Random renewal, but constant.

Drop Off, Pick Up

Why do you leave your feathers for me?
Such seduction garners a bit of suspicion…
And although I enjoy these flirtations
All downy, all stiff and zippered together
All scaly neo-dinosaurian,
Iridescent or buff and shadowy gray,
I still wonder as I bend to retrieve them
Left on the trail side right where
I cannot but help myself,
And so I touch and wonder
And place behind an ear to ponder
Such generous offerings,
Gifts given by friendly but secret strangers
Because I know you only in the moments
As you stop to claim a seed
Or drum on a dead oak in the spring
Or hoot and coo outside my window just last night.
Thank you, I am not ungrateful.
Free, just dropped off
Now picked up
Your feathered beauty beguiles
And serves for a moment to release me with a smile from
My ever-days
And carries me lightly
To your side.

A Dream

I dreamed I was to write the story of my life
On three sheets:

The first was a page of notebook paper
Wide rule
And I wrote my history, full of the
5 Ws
And moments poignant.

The second sheet appeared the same
But try as I may to tell the tale of contemporary years
I could not make the words adhere
Except in the side columns
Along the edges,
And so my current days seem disjointed and squeezed
Off to the periphery.

And finally the third sheet allowed no words
To hold at all
Although I tried to bring it
To bear,
And so my future remains unwritten
And as of yet untold.