Kevin Daniel
It was a tiny thing. A tiny flit
Against the tinted, double-paned window; I
Thought, at first, it was just another autumn casualty,
A dried, brown maple leaf, disturbed in a
forlorn reminiscence of when it had remained in
catholic congress with the tree’s full foliage.
It was not a leaf.
The ratty, tattered morning sky maintained a demuring modesty,
while encroaching, whirling solar systems and
Roiling, shambolic solar activity, occluded, occurred
Far beyond the cumulus pale. I was as yet unbothered
By portents and oracles of daily obligation.
Again, brushingly, hid in a crack beneath the sill, a fluttering.
It was a wren, a common enough presence, one going
About mostly unregarded. Unobserved.
Mostly. Most always, down through an evolutionary
Myth born aloft on twigs and branches ends
Of History’s Hawthorne narrative hedge,
when, calling attention to cloistered saints, or, some
Druidical, omening Samhain semiotic.
The wren beneath the window
just then inhabited that elliptically (sometimes nearer)
Liminal space where we, both,
Bleeding through our happenstance of unbothered dimensionality,
Corporately partook a communion
Wafered in a moment of silence
Soaked with a wine of the ever Eternal Kindness —
one Lighting upon the ground of feathered thoughts, and,
Not revealed except by the comforting portent of its hopping
wings, bobbing head, and ultimately taking flight; the other
Perched upon the penumbra of Pause.
It was a tiny thing. Before the sun broke, and people bustled about.
A tiny, flitting thing indeed.
