A Crow Seen Through a Winter Storm

A Crow Seen Through a Winter Storm


A school board meeting in Ledger, North Carolina. A winter afternoon, storms and snow are blowing in across the mountains. The meeting house is bordered by steep peaks worn bare by cattle. I glance through a high window -


Framed in glass
Riding the pulse of air, pushing upward
Fighting to stay on earth,
Among the low clouds of churning snow


Perfectly fitted to the whirl,
Ragged in old black form
Against the silent whipping snow,
In wonderful bleak December


I have frozen it in my mind
To keep that place from dying


That day was a waste, given to pointless labor.
Empty words and fluorescent light.
I was struck by the power of a simple sight,
That brought me from that place


To a shining inner memory -
Fragments of seasons, triggered by limp cattle-wire
By nameless coves, the ordinary somehow frozen
And endowed with the glow of the eternal


The places we take with us, where we live always
Are those moments we save from the torrent