Saturday, March 23, 2019

The horns of Spring

When, yesterday, we began listing the Sounds of (early) Spring, we committed a mortal sin of omission. From the quotation below, taken from Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, see if you can determine who we left out:
High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks , and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes. At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds....
Yes, you're correct. We omitted sandhill cranes. We are embarrassed and would be more so had we not mentioned them in a slightly different context several weeks ago, on March 1. Today, the Better Half reported having heard cranes as she was returning with her dog, Franco, from their mid-day constitutional. We look forward with high anticipation to both seeing and hearing the returned cranes and are very grateful Leopold's Marshland Elegy remains premature.

sandhill cranes have returned
sandhill cranes have returned
Photo by J. Harrington

The Sandhills




The language of cranes
we once were told
is the wind. The wind 
is their method,
their current, the translated story 
of life they write across the sky. 
Millions of years
they have blown here
on ancestral longing,
their wings of wide arrival, 
necks long, legs stretched out 
above strands of earth
where they arrive
with the shine of water, 
stories, interminable
language of exchanges 
descended from the sky
and then they stand,
earth made only of crane 
from bank to bank of the river 
as far as you can see
the ancient story made new.


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