Turncoat’s Paradise…
Crickets lend a constant undernote.
A hawk soars forty feet over my head,
Weaving the moving air like a warm flowing blanket,
Searching.
A monarch butterfly dashes past my ankles,
Racing for the field across the road,
Faster than my cigar smoke can carry joy to Heaven.
I see ancient fish and thunderbirds,
Watching me from the clouds,
Moving languidly across the wide blue sky.
I take my dead mother’s oak walking stick to hand,
Put to its purpose as I walk out on the path,
Off to meet young oak trees freshly-planted and bearing their first acorns.
Red-wing blackbirds burst up to dance the wind,
The ever-present whispering warm winds.
Two pheasant explode upward to my right,
Racing to safety far afield.
Tiny yellow butterflies do a mad dance punctuated by crazy leaps of grasshoppers.
Milkweed pods wave on undulating stalks,
Only the first few gifting the breeze with soft flying cotton.
Prairie flowers lend colorful purple and yellow flower homes to the orange monarchs,
Some of them I helped to plant.
One walk around this little and living thirty acres,
And I am slowed down to the speed of Mother Earth,
Wondering “what have we done?”
We were once one with all of this,
We who have turned our coats of armor to concrete and steel and oil and glass.
Two hours and a few notes on the harmonica in my pocket,
And I remember with more peace and love in my heart than five decades in a city can touch.
I play for the birds and the grass,
I play for the crickets and butterflies.
Mom would love this place – fiercely,
It was her way.
AquarianM
By: Daniel A. Stafford
(C) 08/28/2013
Eaton Preserve
Plainfield, IL
Comments
Post a Comment