Mountain Sparrow
By Anne Wilson - La Mesa, California, USA - 18 February 2015
Unseen bird, whose waterfall of notes
slid down the sky,
like a nun's song I once heard
whose haunting and celestial notes
of unmatched beauty,
captured the essence
of ecstasy and sorrow.
Like so many things we give
wrong names to, this bird
whose madrigal
reverberated
in crevices of canyons
I later learned
was a canyon wren
-- still, to me,
my "mountain sparrow"
building its nests
as the psalmist wrote
"upon Your altars" . . .
spoke to me of heights I could not reach
until I lived my life beneath
the shadow of its wings,
content not to even
know the names
of my own passage.