Two Love Birds
I write because two love birds smashed into my window and knocked themselves silly.
Two red, cross-billed finches blasting through the air together in their early morning ecstasy, winging in harmony, wheeling and banking and falling and playing
in joyous anticipation of love making and fulfilling their destiny of nests and eggs and babies.
Two star-crossed lovers who did not anticipate the pane of glass.
Their necks did not break.
I cradled them and placed them on the wooden deck and stroked them
and after a while they regained their minds
and flew away, to the north west,
first the female and then the male,
and I am sure they found each other back in their own secret arbour
and made their loving noises and smoothed each others’ feathers.
What else can I do with this event, these feelings,
this idea that there’s no difference between their life and my life.
This understanding that we live on borrowed time, with our hearts in our mouth. By the grace of God. Each moment.
I write because I am a drunken fool pounding on the door of my soul,
demanding she let me in and show me her everything.
Smart girl, she stays hidden behind the door and all I can see is her shadow.
And I am the merciless judge passing sentence on the drunken fool and on my wanton soul and pounding my gavel down and sending the fool and the fool’s soul off to perdition.
The judge, the fool and the fool’s soul
are my unholy trinity.
Lashed together with ropes and chains
they beat upon each other constantly.
Their fights are legendary.
They act badly
and then they are consumed with remorse.
But what I really want is to walk away, to the north west,
and follow the finches and find their arbour,
that place hidden deep in the dappled shade where love is hiding,
where lovers are healing each others’ wounds, where there is succour, where there is food.
Where there is a morsel of thought that becomes a revelation of flavour
and an epiphany of sustenance.
Soul food. Manna.
I write because two love birds crashed into my window.
