The Poetry of Birds
Sunday found me mindfully bird watching for RSPB’s ‘Big Garden Bird Watch’. It was a dreich morning and our feathered friends were lying low. Then in the last minutes a pair of fat bullfinches, the male dazzling in his plump, rosy-pinkness, broke through the mist to land at my feet. It has been a time of winged creatures. Only days earlier, I’d been reading the poems ‘Wild Geese’ and ‘The Swan’ by the amazing Mary Oliver who sadly passed away. Social media has overflowed with her work with people around the world posting their favourite poems in remembrance. A friend shared ‘Temple’ where Oliver says of life, having no other name ‘but breath and light, wind and rain / I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass / and the weeds.’
Heaven for her would undoubtedly be a place rooted in the simplicity of nature.
On 21st December Scotland was stunned by the loss of the giant that was Glasgow’s Tom Leonard. Reading his ‘Outside the Narrative’ collection, I was reminded of his words in ‘Myths in these Parts,’ where he says heaven is simply like going to see your granny, ‘Your granny sits in the sky / with a bag of white peppermint lumps.’
So it has been a time for sadness, and joy, re-finding gems in the words of these marvellous poets, and perhaps contemplating our own mortality.
Thinking about heaven is sort of like choosing your favourite tracks for Desert Island Discs – it made me wonder what my own heaven would be like.
Without hesitation, it would be birds, and trees – yes, trees full of birds.
It’s February already, and thinking about the year ahead there’s a question that’s still floating around in my head. Mary Oliver asks in her poem ‘The Summer Day’, ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?’ (Devotions: New and Selected Poems, 1992)