Spirit Bird

A View of Cranes

An Address to Cranes

Seeing you there, I take comfort in your presence. I hear the rattling call telling me that all is well in the world of cranes, my land of solace.

I first learned of you by reading Aldo Leopold, the Wisconsin naturalist who lamented the sadness of marshes that held no cranes. He saw you as a disappearing species, just like your cousins, the whooping cranes, cut down to just a few hundred.

You may have visited my childhood home in Ohio, but I never saw cranes there, not even a photograph. A crane was a machine, an earthmover, or a steely blue-gray bird I would later call a heron. The confusion is understandable. Linnaeus named that bird the "heron crane." Audubon called one species of heron the “little blue crane.”

Later, I saw you in my adopted home of Tennessee, along its mighty river. I saw your winter dance as beaks gaped open, and I heard your call from miles away as you flew over or I approached your cold-weather refuge. I authored poem after poem of your mystic personas.

Year after year, the bird alerts tell me you have returned. "The cranes are back"—an annual event, but in the longer view, back from the brink. You fooled old Aldo Leopold and everyone else, abounding in tens of thousands beside the Tennessee River and hundreds of thousands along the Platte.

You always return along rivers, and we hold a festival here, though it did not occur in the years of Covid-19. I looked at the November fog and said, "The cranes are back." With no festival on the way, I drove to the refuge to seek your presence there, me older and wondering if another November would come.

Peter Matthiessen called cranes The Birds of Heaven and described every species named. He called Sandhill Cranes "The Bird from the East," as you are known in Siberia, where some members of your tribe nest, returning across the Bering Strait to America for the winter.

But you will always be the birds of Tennessee for me. You returned as I knew you would, from Wisconsin marshes, where you appear in pairs to sing, dance, mate, and nest. Welcome home.

Spirit Bird

Every time I see cranes,
a door opens into the spirit world.
They arrive to bring news of winter
and depart with the promise of spring.
They carry messages between worlds.
 
Their arrival is always anticipated, but
unexpectedly, they arrive and call.
Said to mate for life, they dance
when reunited after a long separation.
Their longing calls fill my heart.
 
Departing this world,
I will know I am bound
for blessed realms
if cranes accompany me.

The poem ”Spirit Bird” previously appeared in Number One, the literary magazine of Volunteer State Community College, Gallatin, Tennessee.

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