This poem came to mind on a late night bicycle commute towards the end of October. I was returning home after an stop to eat and read following a day of packing emergency parachutes for pilots and reserve parachutes for skydivers. While in the parking lot donning rain gear, reflective items and turning my lights and flashers on I first heard the sound of large wings and then the calls of scores of Canada geese from all across the northern horizon. I paused for quite a while to listen and search even though it was a foggy, cold night with the temperatures in the upper 30s.
Midnight Migration
Haunting calls out of clouded darkness vie,
Photo by Frank Starmer, CC-BY-NC-SA
Echoed both left and right,
Choruses from the northern sky.
Visible in o'er cast winter's night,
Chevrons forming, shifting, reforming;
Airborne ghosts gliding in and out of sight.
Pinions in counterpoint sigh,
Heard with breath held light.
Haunting calls out of cloudy darkness vie.
The poem started out as five lines of free verse, no meter or rhyme. That may well have been the better version. The trouble is that four years of literature in a Catholic, all male, high school back in the seventies would not let me leave it without rhyme and meter. Blame Mr. Joe Baker at Christian Brothers HS in Memphis.
