The Loon

ABC Wednesday
September 28th, 2016

The letter is L for Loon

The Loon

Not quite four a.m. when the rapture of being alive

strikes me from sleep, and I rise

from the comfortable bed and go

to another room, where my books are lined up

in their neat and colourful rows.  How

magical they are!  I choose one

and open it.  Soon

I have wandered in over the waves of the words

to the temple of thought.

And then I hear

outside, over the actual waves, the small,

perfect voice of the loon.  He is also awake,

and with his heavy head uplifted he calls out to the fading moon, to the pink flush

swelling in the east that, soon,

will become the long, reasonable day.

Inside the house

it is still dark, except for the pool of lamplight

in which I am sitting.

I do not close the book.

Neither, for a long while, do I read on.

Mary Oliver

or this......

The Loon on Oak-Head Pond

cries for three days, in the gray mist

cries for the north that it hopes it can find

plunges, and comes up with a slapping pickerel,

blinks its red eye

cries again

you come every afternoon and wait to hear it,

you sit a long time, quiet, under the thick pines,

in the silence that follows,

as though it were your own twilight, 

as though it were your own vanishing song.

Mary Oliver,  (again)

For more great Ls visit here at ABC Wednesday

with thanks to Roger, Denise, Leslie

and their lovely helpers.