Dawn Chorus

Dawn Chorus

The woman-mother-artist, upon rising each morning, must choose:

make the bed or write.

What will it be?

The seven minutes before bustling, while the forest birds sing through her window

compress time–

Everything opens with the Western Flycatcher’s song.

The tiny brown, bobbing bird on a branch is not worried about making her bed or morning exercise or how to get all of the grading done today.

The atmospheric conditions of this summer morning guarantee someone will hear the song.

Someone will listen.

The Black-capped Chickadee sings her DEEEEN-O! –a hopeful broad so early. She’s planning nothing—perched in perfection.

There’s always one of us who never looks back. There’s always one of us who chooses the poem every time.

The Downy Woodpecker, with her French red cap and black and white spotted jacket, is not worried about the dishwasher, or the carpet, or returning emails; she must be going somewhere fancy so early.

Maybe she is a soldier in the old Cottonwood–get lost–her song delivers to those thinking of moving in.

The woman-mother-artist hears cars hum on the curvy road out of the foothills and into town.

Into work.

Into people.

Get lost.

Now is the time for forest birds to map the way. Now is the time to sing back to the place so hard to find, even when it’s right here.

“Poetry Is Not a Luxury” Excerpt from Audre Lorde

“For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises… These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling.

Within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive… We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare. If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core — the fountain — of our power… the future of our worlds.

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt — of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead — while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.

As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.”