2022
Curlew gr ace well s
“People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love and to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.” —Wendell Berry “What an unearthly aria that call was. Sometimes I would think it isn’t a call at all. But if it isn’t, what is it? Is it a spontaneity of eternity that has somehow come through into time? Hearing his voice, a god who had made the curlew would almost instantly want to remake himself as the thing he had made. Universes he couldn’t call into being with a human voice he could call into being with the voice of a curlew.” —John Moriarty
Above the beach at Kilmacreehy, ten curlews become eleven curlews in a small flock of wing and glide that I follow after like a younger child. Birds possessed of little more than sky— a sky so blue it turns the waves aquamarine, and lights the wet sand cobalt-blue, Liscannor Bay become so sheltering that I am almost fooled to forget how the curlews are fading now; the wings that fly around my head trace a fragile cusp of life, the wick of their species is burning low. So in the way that others sit at the bedsides of the dying, I accompany the curlews out to where their blue sands will surely end,
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The Lowell Review
