A Mockingbird Appears

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photoWhen ideas and inspiration have ceased, at least for the time being, to well up from the inside, it’s a mercy that the wide world contains so many and will hand them to me if I keep my senses ready enough. I often find myself too distracted by the busyness and pedestrian chores of the workaday world to see the magical other dimensions right within my reach, and need some helpful pricking from a sight or sound or scent as I pass through to remind me to open up the eye and ear and heart and take advantage of the universe’s generosity when it’s poured out so liberally right within my grasp.photoI walk in a haze of dully daily thought, lost to the world of rich and rare delights I’m walking in, when suddenly a mockingbird appears and turns its bright eye on me and seems to contemplate how absent I must be to almost pass it by when it’s quite nearly underfoot. In that shining eye a world reflects in which the other me is wrapped around with blooms, with drifting clouds sailing across a broad blue sky; with jasmine-scented breeze, with mist as the sprinklers spring to life, with happy shouts from a handful of little playing school kids passing me, looking for miracles of their own everywhere because they are yet too young to have forgotten them so foolishly as I have done. When the bird takes to its stripe-blazed wings and dives back into the air, my thoughts begin to follow and fly with it again: I am awake once more to flight and tune in to the rippling, rolling variations of its song as it rises to the trees, and soars above, and makes me remember that I am in a world full of wonder, if I will only let it fill me again.graphite drawing

Gleaming Afternoon

While I would soar, would gladly fly

Wide, in an arc across the sky

Whose dome of hotly burnished brass

Encompasses at every pass

The great wild height of atmosphere

That would engage to hold me here,

I can, eyes shut and spirit wide,

Pierce heaven to the great Outside.

16 thoughts on “A Mockingbird Appears”

  2. This happens many times. Suddenly you loose your inspiration and feel listless. And you also start worrying whether it will ever return! Whenever it happens to me, I start shooting flowers in my garden or birds that visit it! They pep me up!

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  4. Kathryn,
    While I have enjoyed a lot of your poetry, your prose is equally provacative. I would love to see you construct the text of A Mockingbird Apears into a concrete poem, and shape the words into a mockingbird in flight. I’d hang that on my office wall to keep me out of the distraction of the “busyness and pedestrian chores of the workaday world”. Brava!

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    • Hmmm, a lovely idea, that. I’ve never done concrete poems other than a little bit of unintentional shaping that came out of the process organically (so to speak!), so I will have to contemplate how to approach such a thing. I like the idea, indeed I do. Thank you for inspiring me!
      xo

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  6. The first picture reminded me that I once saw a grackle with a crumb hopping on the pavement at a fast food place over to a rain puddle to wash his morsel. 🙂 Enjoyed the poem, too!!

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    • Grackles amuse me immensely. They’re truly characters, even when they’re being a bit pesky, and I love that they seem somehow a bit too ungainly and awkward for a bird, as though their tails are too much equipment for them to handle or something. 🙂 Like crows, they seem to be fair problem-solvers too, as with the grackle gourmet you spotted!

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