Birds of the Season

"Tomorrow, which never comes but already is, I'll be here again, and still. You can meet me - if it's meant to be" -a bird of the Season

How many sentences were still in the night, but which she heard clapping, on leaves and against stones. "Throw! Throw!" the clouds sang to the breeze that went through her sun woven hair. Early fall, and sweet apples hung from starlike branches. Orchards running among lanes of sunset colored rivers and tall feathery trees, the ones that monitor the world quietly when the snow makes them into blue giants under the moon. You could fill your basket and feed your horses with the textures of this place. Her home that she knew, with the birds of the Season.

And she heard music - like the kind that chimes in and out - weathered with joy but held by Sadness. And short small drums of sound mixed up with her footsteps there outside the cabin. Kicking leaves and saying sorry. Acknowledging her belly becoming a womb. The music was Sounds and they were empty to the World, yet still, somehow by magic, always somehow, encompassed her entirely. Timpani, forest rustling, laughter of someone's mother, and the same smiling sun that hung there day after day. She was wild - held onto her own free will like the trees labeled in bark, and picking off scabs like wounds that never cared. The Season hastily awoke in the East and she was the curtain it held open long after the bow.

Two large hogs had been murdered openly and she wanted only one thing - To demolish the presence that it had left behind. It stuck to the surroundings, an Orange Persistence...an unsettled continuous cry in the night. The babe inside was making its way in its own world. The forests it knew - vessels. The skies - her fluid. The air - the blood. Opening into new space she had somehow known to prepare for it, she itched and grew faster with the Time it became, then slowed. There were ringing feverish birds relaying messages between them. Things like, "Hold tight" and "Momma is here". But real birds - blue birds - with gentle beaks, known to sit atop those feathery trees near the orchard, the shed of the neighbor, the room where she slept, denying the hoarse cries of the wetlands and of the restless hogs, would write - scribble down on the page, what she was to hear next. The message of the Season and who she could become, she read: "It's Me"