Lead

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

Well, I wrote too soon yesterday. Mary answered her own question about what we shall with our hearts; we are to journey to places where our heart's break. Her pathway in this poem is through the death of beautiful birds. Yup, that'll do it all right. So I journey to places where birds still sing, and there is an urgency to this. Maybe I can do something about it, but more than anything, my heart does not wish to be far from the beauty of parrots and people, even as they desert their last community of mixed species to become part of the urban caged and poor.

Perhaps it is a bit morbid to go to where hope is hard to find. I say not. For in these places, we know what love is, and we know of what worth interconnecting life is. Out of that space comes a sense of peace and belonging. Even when cloaked in a disguise that says "wrongdoing" we may recognize the true face of god as a love that if we turned all the way towards that fire, our ego would burn away.

May it be so.

What breaks your heart so that the whole world may fall in