☀️ The Daily Boost #877

Our souls are songbirds

The Daily Boost (published weekdays) is one of the newsletters of The Raft, the online community of author Phyllis Cole-Dai. We Rafters ride the river of life buoyed by music, poetry, and other arts, plus water-drops of wisdom. Most everything here is free, but patrons (paid subscribers) get some special perks as a gesture of gratitude.

MIGRATION SONG
Larry Schug

Our bodies die like the bodies of trees.
No matter how we strive for the sky
or how many rings we count inside our skin,
in the end, we shed our bark,
lose the strength of our limbs
as our roots relinquish their grip in the earth,
the owner of all flesh and bone, muscle and blood. 

But our souls are songbirds
nesting in swaying branches,
singing sweetly after weathering the storms
that strip the green leaves from our lives,
and when the tree falls, the bird spreads its wings,
leaps to join the flock, answer the call
of those who have left the nest before,
a song no bird can resist.

Each of us leave behind our own song
to comfort those left staring at the sky;
a song that is not forgotten,
even as, beyond the horizon, we fly.

 
(from The Turning of Wheels)

(My thanks to Larry Schug, via an email from the poet.)

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