Morning Birds
We are fortunate to live here. How are we to ever leave?
Beside me now is a young blackbird - it ventured within two feet of me; I fell still to observe it closely. It's siblings roam close by, picking at the grass for insects. A pair of jays have come also. They daren't venture so close, but their impressive blue streak hides now among the acer's maroon leaves.
My eye tracks far beyond the garden wall, across the Vale of Pewsey, and to fields and forests many miles away. I can barely make out the separate layers of canopies. But a few days passed, a momentous cloud sailed the skies, it's darking shadow stalking it across the golden fields far from here.
A crow now flies to the top of a conifer, preening itself, gazing across the nearby farmland, where the grass has grown long and gold. Monday passed, a lady pheasant and four of her children tottered amongst the undergrowth, the trees and bushes, on the Western side of the garden. A female roe-deer comes nightly to consume my mothers beloved sweet-peas, and gobble the flowers in the lawn I have permitted grow wild. In the last months, stationed atop the farmers barn I spied a barn owl, regal white plumage, magnificent and powerful in flight, yet silent as the stars. As dusk grows, come out the bats flitting to and fro, hunting the insects inhabiting these lands.
I gaze out this window beside, my soul magnified, yet bittersweet. We grieve still. Should I ever move on from this place, I shall never again have such a view that my mother and father enjoyed. Mere mortar and brick made magic by wonder and seasons and the wild creatures of the Earth.
Finally, the birds have come to drink at the bath I laid just beside the door some weeks ago. The water is kept fresh, mind! Perhaps I have placed it too close to the house, within a yard of the kitchen door, and where I sit now. A single thrush, though I did not know how to determine if song or mistle. We looked at one another a long while. It returns; it is a song thrush after all. It is no mere drink, but a joyous bathe!
