Two Feather Sunday

I have been in a quiet lately. I think a fair few of us have. Into that quiet came a recent post by Caroline Ross about about words in wartime. Wartime (most often referred to these last centuries as Now) is she suggests a time for words. Not words, though, that un-moon the sky. She prescribes, instead, chalice.

We may be a man in a cottage growing a forest from scratch

or a woman walking away from the devastation of her burning home, 

so we must grow our words from scratch too.

From Scratch. Originally this was a phrase about the starting line of a race, that ritual where all runners show fealty to linear time and ask its favor while poised at attention or bowed low before its assigned image marked into the earth.  It was an agreement about leveling. Some dictionaries go further simplifying it to “starting from nothing”. This sounds of ex nihilo envy, the self assurance of the amnesiac who would forget the surfeit of the triple goddess, her unformed, void and dark faces of the deep.  I don’t recognize that type of claim in  the fetching words above. We all stand on the fur and scales of giants. But there are other senses circling the sound, more chalice and moon if you will:

Scratch. To break the surface after something below, sometimes with a tool, often sharp. To undo or strike out with a pen or pencil. To mark the skin with this process. A way of assembling something from the offerings at hand, usually considered by experts to be of lesser quality.

Now what’s defined there sings full throat in my middle, fully entangled, night-lit and cupping and everything uncivil in the gift of Caroline’s post.

Genus Aerodramus

“The cave swift constructs its nest from saliva and uses its own voice to echolocate shelter in the caves, both sanctuary and the way to the same coming forth from the throat. Their nests, reachable by precarious bamboo scaffolding and steep ascent, are considered a delicacy." (from a Treasury of Birds)

“We have known every cave and every unseen path on the sacred face of our battered but relentless land and her canyons and mountains that protected us as the world turned its face away…” (Hawzhin Azeez speaking of Rojava)

These nests we weave,
wellsprings risen from the red,
the silvered sounds set firm.
The swiftlet makes its home
from spit, sweet laminae of terms
sworn into the falling dark.

A watcher's brow, one grotto arcs us 
moon to sun, her silence bows us
ear to drum to drum, all word returning
one to One, walking barefoot, 
bright upon the vow-swept floor.

These nests we weave, fierce stranding spun
of wish which comes at quiet moment when
the first few are awake and all the promises
of home are passed in bowls
rim ringing every sacred name.

All song and air against
the nest-eaters 

At Light’s Wane

A hinge sounds
a door open
where pipers tip-toe the watered
skin of the shore,
wooing us to the edge
of the curling-under
to snatch a sparling dusk
from the grasping turn.

Into the low tide sand—matron
saint of every fugitive’s worlding—
fingers scrawl fastening words 

to chant
to keep
until we go:
single file,
salt to salt,
like to like,
back over the rim.

For a half-light season
ten breaths long,
we are deserters
unstitching the bond, singing,
unclasping all guile.
Rags on the shore.
Skin quilled into the chill
of November, our lips
murmuring fledgling mutinies to wing. 

Cave image from Tim Denholm, CC BY 4.0