A Midnight Musing: North Bound Geese
We left the warmth of southern fields
the soils of black, and red,
the buds of green.
A thousand years drew our hearts away
unexplainably north, to cold.
Over the mirror lakes,
the many colored boxes
on ribbons of white, gold, black and blue
the spires of spruce, pine and popple
comes the scent of distant prairie,
pine and cattail in dream's dance
of the northern lights.
Alas, I'm not absolutely sure if I wrote this, although I do remember its possible inspiration being that of fifty years ago. It was late at night in Des Moines, I was living amid its familiar vehicle traffic noises; its intrusive lights, web of overhead wires and suffocating skyline. I two or three years into buying the farm in NW Minnesota and longing to live there in its almost wilderness; I could well imagine its everyday there, every hour, when over the sound of the TV a faint intimately familiar sound I heard from outdoors that gave me pause. I turned my head toward the front door, told my wife to turn down the TV -- which she thought strange (it was still very early in our marriage) when I heard it again my fifty-years younger brain shifting into recognition mode ripping open the life-long file drawers of recognition in its vault "It's ... it's ...." GEESE!" I yelled and burst from the front door of the house, and out from under the large tree in our backyard, away from the street light nearby to stand between the neighbor's house and ours where it was dark, and looked up to faintly see them winging their way north way high above the city. The wife thought I was nuts; wouldn't be the last time.
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