Light Reflections

Hummingbird by GeorgeB2 – Pixabay https://pixabay.com/photos/bird-close-up-in-flight-hummingbird-2645184/

I was watching the leaves flutter in the breeze when a flash seemed to sparkle from, I don’t know, a less defined shadow, and like the sun reflecting on glass, I considered this:

— self and its myopic concerns is a tendency in time not a thing that has already happened.

And I actually felt the flash, I am not only a gathering of memories, but a living unfolding, a being in transition, a clarifying awareness. From seeing through this more fundamental perspective there was appreciation that memories may guide, but the past need not control a limited conceptual future, there is freedom to receive the arriving clarity of my being…

Then, this poem from Ken arrived in time, more light-reflections, like the movement of shimmering water…

Bird Sighting
By Ken McKeon

Iridescent green fleck light gold shine,
This back of a folded wing set against
Dark green still leafed tree, both held,
Both stabilized, surface forms,
Broad ease and checked impulse bound
And set out here this late fall day,

And then this hummingbird pops up and skips on out
In an instantaneous reshape of the whole garden scene,
Towering twists that break apart in shoot aways,
Dead trembling stalls that freely jam out into all arounds,

And my spine trills, and my back lifts,
And new light feeds my eyes, shining right along,
As the newly founded multi-field warps out its lively ways,
Walls fall away, arise then, a new angular staircase, wing lifts
A sheer bounce to a high drift, new light welcoming each new step,
Up or down, sideways too, to follow it one by one,
A hopeless progression, and yet this flight sings true,

No guidebook would lead us here,
Only surprise, the impossibles, the stirs,
Life itself rolls out to us, into us, as us too,

And my thought is that this startling bird
Is happy in its sky play,
Takes joy in the stunning climbs, spills,
Flash around blurs it makes at will,

Its own truth, own guide, own way,

And I find myself within
It’s ever changing buoyancies,
Thrilled, left behind, exhausted now,

And I need to catch my breath,
And pull it from the pure blue sky,
I do just that half expecting misty contrails
To show up in my throat lungs heart belly groin

And so they do, these moist bubbling traces
Laid down by the stir and whirr
Of glittering wings, I find them now
Within each draw and each release,

And these and this your gift to me, dear bird,
A piece of light wrought by you this day
Here in your lift of play around fade
Found in these wing spun passages
Sung out this late October afternoon.