A Talk with Tyto alba
To the garden watered
by my tears
the Barn Owl came one night.
He sat on a branch,
swiveling his windowed head
and asked me why
I cried.
“Are you lonely
here, in this place
you built yourself? Do the walls
draw in at evening
and do you miss the sigh
of free wind I sail?”
I looked in his eyes
round as apples, golden
orbs drawing light
from dark, and shook my head.
“Then is it the stone
you carry inside, the one
that presses so hard on your lungs,
heavy with years, hollow with loss,
sharp with fear
of tomorrow?”
I shook my head
and said,
“I don’t cry for what I’ve lost
or what I am or what will be.
I cry for what I’ve broken
and what has broken me.”
“Very sensible,”
said my friend
with a dip of his wing
and left my garden,
chasing the soft
sweet rustlings
in the grass.
June 2011
Image: Lechuza (Tyto alba) by macha.cl posted on flick'r
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"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." ~William Butler Yeats
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