Rose Hill Cemetery
Macon, Georgia

 

MOCKINGBIRD

“Peace is something most often to be preferred to confrontation for nations

or lovers.  The word can be confusing, though, like a mockingbird.”
         -from the poem “War and Peace” by Miller Williams

 

Mockingbirds don’t mock but sing multivariate songs
In mystery bird language
A rhythmed poetry
Broadcast from a high place of wire or treed canopy
Over summer green as feathers fall
Impossible to ignore
Unless you are dying or dead

Every day I hear the same mockingbird 

Perched on the traffic light
As I walk to work
I used to think the sibilant flowing water of French
Was the most beautiful language
Or the sing-song of Japanese
Until I heard that mockingbird

Once at Arlington I heard a mockingbird sing

From the elm shadowing President Kennedy’s forever flame
High above the bones and buttons of those men
Whom pulled the abscessed tooth of slavery
From that hallowed place
Where they now lie
Beneath bone-white incisor headstones

Once at Arlington I heard a mockingbird sing

High above a swarm of tourists
And teenage twitter bugs taking selfies
But they couldn’t hear
The mockingbird blues





Greg Allman sang “freight train, each car looks the same” which is certainly true but not in this case . . .

 

 

 

“That train'd punch a hole in the wind!”

-unknown Texan

Duane Allman's grave
Rose Hill Cemetery
Macon, Georgia

In this dark world of another war,

I think of human nature,
not the animal stalking food.
That is need. 
But something else that dwells in some men,
the longing for power, riches, revenge.
I’ve lived too long to see
more bombs, more light falling,
true terror and fear
in the eyes of the innocent,
the light of belief
in the eyes of the guilty.
The dark opening that goes from eye to brain
fails to right the world.

-from the poem “The Eyes” by Linda Hogan



Rose Hill Cemetery
Macon, Georgia

“A modern man, I do not make undue connections though my heart wrenches daily against the unknowable, almighty throb and heave of the universe against my skin that sings a song for which we haven’t quite found the words.”

            -Jim Harrison

Rose Hill Cemetery
Macon, Georgia

 

Rose Hill Cemetery
Macon, Georgia

Rose Hill Cemetery
Macon, Georgia

“If I took picture after picture out of simple high spirits and the joy of being alive, the way I began, I can add that in my subjects I met after with the same spirits, the same joy.  Trouble, even to the point of disaster, has its pale, and these defiant things of the spirit repeatedly go beyond it, joy the same as courage.”

-Eudora Welty, from her book of photographs One Time, One place of Mississippi during the Great Depression