carolina

By Zander Hooper

I. Blue Jay

For hours we have sat here, the dark clouds that loom over us, a worn down canoe, the only thing that separated us from the black realm under our feet. I could hear the blood churning inside of me. Everything seemed dead until the silence of the wilderness, broken by the call of a bluejay, a simple song that I had heard many times before, a reminder that there’s life here. My desire to be in the dense Carolina wood had been stunted by my family’s hatred of it. Sometimes hard to see it as beautiful, but the wild had its own ways of reminding me.

II. Azure Sky

As if it was a conductor calling to the orchestra, simple notes from a single song metamorphosed into a symphony of bird calls.

Their music breaks through the dense forest and washes over me like soft rainfall

It seemed to make everything come alive

As if demanding to be heard. The trees shook dancing to their melody. The dense gloom, broken to reveal a lustrous, azure sky. The blackness below awoke with bubbling, the trout I had been here to find leaping, escaping their tomb of silence. Just to hear them.

Just as quickly the song started, it disappeared: the birds went back to their silent brooding, the trees returned to their motionless state.