After dreaming of you, this morning just after dawn I heard a raucous flight of blackbirds.  It is a common enough sight and sound here, all heading east in the morning toward the lifting light to some winter or spring corn field, scavenging and squabbling over the leavings in the stubble, and then in the evening suddenly exploding into the air, veering at first in all directions and then gathering into one seemingly single-minded gesture, a shared instinct and purpose, riding the curve where the horizon falls into the last light they will never catch up to, coming to rest perhaps in the trees by another field, or perhaps in my little woods where they bend every branch with the weight of their folded wings, deepening the darkness, a scene no doubt older than the first man and likely to endure long after the last. 

                          our story too

                          told in the sound

                          of their wings

Or perhaps not, each year fewer fields, their furrows filled with concrete, more trees uprooted and woods clear-cut; the legacy of loss you inherit without really knowing what is being lost.

                          on a pine stump

                          wounded blackbird

                          one wing in the air

But today this familiar noisy clatter did not soon fade into the distance, and I went out to watch. Birds were coming from north, east and south and joining into one endless streaming of dark passage to the west, like storm clouds racing with the wind, so many that I could actually hear the sound of wings. I apportioned a segment of sky to estimate how many birds there were in all, and as they kept coming and going I stopped after several tens of thousands, and still they came.  I watched for at least ten minutes and never saw the last of their number.

                         low darkening clouds

                         the little light there is

                         on their black wings

I was reminded of the stories a Comanche grandfather told to the children, who were starving . . . how once the buffalo were so many that it took two days for a herd to pass by, and another for the clouds of dust to settle from the sky, each a blessing beyond counting, and lost then to the children except in their grandfather's remembering, memory passing into legend and legend becoming myth.

                           wind in the pines

                           telling his stories

                           in the old language

Perhaps these birds too were one last great passage of and into the past, entering into a dark and deep distance, and buffalo or bird, we shall not see their like again.

But this is my legacy to you: my hope they will yet come to you in your and their time, and you will remember your grandfather's stories, and hear your own on the wings of the birds. 

                              generations

                        new fledgling feathers

                           and the old nest