Between Birdsong and Boulder

Photography by David Noah,
Winterville, Georgia.

Athens, Georgia

June 14, 2011; revised September 17, 2014

Somewhere above an unseen bird

puffs up and girds his half ounce frame
to sing a territorial claim
with ancient notes that pierce the dawn. 
Some precious seconds pass in song,
a moment more and echo’s gone
subsiding in the summer breeze. 

The insubstantial fades away; 
before a thought, it all recedes
to pressure waves where chaos breeds.

Somewhere in time a youthful earth
contracts her planetary girth 
and clears her molten throat to sing 
boulders. Three hundred million years 
and more, extruded magma from her core
some two miles down became this rock
which anchors moss to woodland floor.

Though passive mass persists today, 
through centuries it, too, recedes
to blowing dust where chaos breeds. 

Somewhere in shifting entropy 
new riffs arise in life’s old song 
with notes of animated dust 
evolving in the space that’s formed 
from light blue sky of summer morn
to dark brown smells of humic soil,
from child’s first laugh to granite stone.

Here between the pensive ache 
        and passive weight of what must be, 
chaos breaks – the soul is freed 

to stalk the fleeting, ferret meaning, 
        fiercely singing to the night. 
of life bestride the borderlands 
                of birdsong and boulder.