Without the rainbow's freshly painted arc, the tired heart might forget how to sing.
—new proverb.
			 
Desire's hidden bird, whose old sweet song 
the whole world waits to hear, will trill it out. 
Every night's a flood of darkness from the cave  
where the well of hope refills it. Fed with stillness: 
Don't you wonder what that does to cells 
that take their energy from sunlight?  

It's what every dreaming listener knows: 
a way to settle life, to make some sense 
in a reeling world whose graying seams 
strain the rainbow’s recompense. 


The words— o hear the night bird call—
invite us all to plunge into the stream 
we neither fish nor navigate, where music swims, 
in all its coloration. In that cave where all begins. 
Where the night bird shines a silver line 
out toward the stars. 
 
Maybe the elders understand the way 
to cast for pure hope’s sake, for fooling gravity, 
the laughing wake of time’s demise. It's past 
my knowing, now I'm an elder too. Forward 
it pulls me, inward toward the center. 

The feral yawp of Death, at illumination’s very brink, 
stirs the background. It is a breath drawn deep  
into the soul. 

Awake or asleep, we listen for that call, 
far from the mind's cool suspended wink, 
attuned to what wells up from what we feel— 
not from what we think.