When Night is the Mother of Wisdom

“...ours is not an age of mystics...the erection of the (Gothic) cathedrals was the last wild

stride European man made before falling back into the confines of his intellect.” Barry Lopez.

Long before first light

a magpie wakes me, sings a song

fragment, pauses, then repeats it.

She mesmerises with her plaintive, yet,

determined

melody, carries its sweet

sorrow into my waking and into my sleeping,

until I can barely tell

one from the other. Perhaps another

bird answers. I listen hard, and

hear nothing, only night in its vastness,

and a sense

that darkness grants

her pre-eminence, that she sings for the rocks

in the long arc of their

listening, for trees in their standing,

for the animals and birds; that she's

an emissary for all that's sentient and more

than human.

Sometime later, I dream

a narrow track through a blue-gum forest; everything

is wet and smells of rain.

Ankle-deep in mud and weary

at the thought of the heavy trail

ahead, the unclouded song of a magpie

lifts the gloom

that weighs me down.

I recognise her chant; as in my waking hours, it goes

on and on. As sometimes

happens in a dream, I'm gifted

flight, and rise without effort

to a branch that's a spar to a mast.

Seven birds—

all pied—perch along

it; but one alone intones. She's lord of the birds,

and those beside her stare

straight ahead; they breathe in

time, as if they too, were in

voice. I'm but a wing span away,

and yet,

they allow me to stay

in their company, to be a novice chorister too.

First light arrives and wakes

me again. The magpie,

still in song, is distant now.

Daylight breaks and I hear no more

from her.

I lie a while in bed

and think of birds, of how halfway through nesting

last season, this magpie

and her mate—who often visit

the slender limbs of the spotted gum

in my yard, and carol as I hang the washing—

lost their home—

a penthouse—

when the Norfolk pine next door was taken down.

Last night I dreamt

she sang of loss—as she did well

into the evening of that day the giant

pine was rendered like a whale on the deck

of a factory ship—

and of hope,

that a human cradled by sweet darkness—

dreaming a blue-gum

cathedral which climbs an endless

milky sky—will trust the birds

to know the rites that might return

a lapsed

member to his place

in the family of things; to live as he dreams, again.

Notes:

“...ours is not an age...” - Barry Lopez, Chapter 6, Ice and Light from Arctic Dreams, 2001, p250

“sweet darkness” - the title of a poem by David Whyte, from his collection House of Belonging.

“...place in the family of things” - from Mary Oliver's poem Wild Geese.