Redbird

This morning a single redbird

returned to the hemlock

and sang as if winter

had been nothing,

as if five months of silence

were simply the pause

a song requires

before it can mean something again.

🐦

I stopped and stood there.

The hill held its breath around it,

or perhaps I did.

That old confusion

of never knowing

where the world ends

and I begin.

🐦

Snow still lingered in hollers,

shining faintly under pale light,

and the hemlock needles

dripped from last night’s thaw,

tiny diamonds falling slowly

onto the brown, waiting earth.

🐦

I have missed things before

and thought the missing

would last forever.

I have stood in cold certainty

and called it truth,

watching shadows stretch

across the holler of my own thought.

🐦

The redbird paid no attention.

It sang the way spring always comes,

fully itself,

its song finding the hemlock

on a morning you almost

stayed inside,

filling the whole hill

with the fact of itself.

🐦

I felt something loosen inside me,

that cold, certain part

that holds tight to absence,

and watched it open

as the hill opened,

as snowdrops edged upward

through ice-dark soil,

as sunlight touched the bark

and the air itself seemed to breathe.

🐦

This is what returns do.

They disregard readiness.

They come back singing,

carrying pieces of all that has passed,

and something in you shifts,

expands, remembers

how it is to wait,

how it is to watch,

how it is to witness

the ordinary miracle

of life returning.