March 2024 - On the Ground, Alone

The first day of March marks the start of meteorological spring. Yesterday, on a stroll around the Acton Arboretum, I came upon a clutch of snowdrops, the first I’ve seen this season.  Their white petals, delicately edged in the green of summer grass, nodded to a ground still winter bleak and bare. All about us the world is awakening, from low to the ground to high above in the blue-lit sky.

On the Ground, Alone

By Dawn Paul

You catch the high wind above the sheltering trees

sift it through your outspread wing feathers

as though fingering a silk scarf

rock gently side to side, wings held at the perfect tilt

alert for the scent of something cooked by the sun,

or maybe just cruising the sky on this spring day

after the long winter.

When another of your kind comes kiting along

to drift by your side and you lift together on an updraft

I breathe deeply, fill my chest with air.

Dawn Paul is the author of  The Country of Loneliness, a novel, and What We Still Don’t Know, poems on scientist Carl Linnaeus. She has published poetry, fiction and science/nature articles in journals and magazines, including Orion Magazine, Comstock Review and Stonecoast Review. She has been awarded residencies at Shoals Marine Laboratory, Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference and Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories.