The Singing Grounds

a haibun

The Singing Grounds

A season's turning, early evening. The meadow is a fawn-soft blur of burnt sienna and bisque—an ocean of seedpods, winter asters and swaying grasses. We walk thorny edges, look and listen for shorebirds of the forest. Wait for dusk to give its blessing. And then, a glaucous hush wraps us in quiet too old for any of us to remember. Wind moves through the tree line like a ghost. The meadow hums to itself. The first peents ping. Hoarse. Buzzy. A radio tower light strobes in the distance. With more peents, a flurry of musical chirps and warbles. I track a flash of mottled-brown in a tangle of brush. Was it a woodcock? Too dark now for binoculars, I give in to gloam and watch for song to take shape. 

wingtips twitter
zigzag skyward
in the dimming light

Farmed for decades, this native grassland and nesting ground for American woodcocks has been preserved by our local park system.

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Thank you for reading a small spectacle. For more poems about nature, its healing wonder and resilience, my self-published collection No One Ever Says is available from the LuLu bookstore.