Grace Wells Curlew

Curlew

grace wells

“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,

but each soft step sinks me deeper into our Earth’s embrace,

and when the curlews call, their song enchants—

lifting me with them, until I am airborne, feathered, flying.