Where did my songbird go?
Did she fly down old Magnolia Lane,
Past the honeysuckle and up and away?
To high above a busy traffic street
With horns honking in diminished tones?
And heavy tire rolls skidding
Back and forth
Below her soprano?
So high, her words are deaf to us,
Beautiful and distant as if she never did exist.
Did she? Ever?
She flew as high as my thoughts were far and wide,
Into the never-land of clouds and blue sky,
She was but a speck of wing
On the horizon of EVERYTHING,
All that was grand and gone and only thought of
In song —
She was my songbird.
Sweet and fevered, her wings used to beat
So strong, so strong…
While her frame, so thin, was unburdened,
Her mind, unfettered —
We had between us
The sweet shine of late afternoon.
And though we lived a worldly life,
Our days combined with evenings and nights
And thoughts of the divine —
She sang to me often of TIME,
Of life beyond TIME,
Of dreams that were only mine.
But we were alone, she and I,
She with my thoughts, and I with her song-rhymes…
And we had all of TIME, untapped within us,
Valuable, protected, golden.
Mine and hers,
Precious, soft and malleable,
Like the pressures from fire and heat and soul.
And so she sang
From her perch outside,
Looking in,
Singing so sweet,
To one so young —
And I told her of people I had known,
Of relationships undefined,
Of words spoken that had suspended time.
And we soared away,
She on the wind,
Me, in my mind…
We’d nearly collide so high, above,
And then she would dive like an arrow, so fast,
Down,
Past the sky,
To catch a phrase,
And to devise with me a way through life
That had as much meaning as we could find —
She and I were free, we said,
We would always be free — we thought,
Because how else could one spend TIME?
Down on Magnolia Lane
Where the honeysuckle smells so fine,
She sang —
Sure and steady,
We, so certain of our TIME.