Poem: March 6, 2019

Woodpecker

This morning Sophia and I heard the staccato
echo of a woodpecker somewhere near our house.

It's strange how a sound can delight us
because it is both familiar and unfamiliar.

We forget too easily that we are part of a world
to which we are capable of listening,

but there it was: the urge to pause, to put down
our backpacks and go looking up into the trees

for the source of this seductive percussion,
to go meet the new neighbor, as it were.

And what if we had followed that thread?
What if we had stayed home from work and school

to listen to a woodpecker or to catalog
the emergent sounds of late winter?

How long would we find ourselves outside,
feeling the sun and chill mingle in the air?

We're not accustomed to unstructured time
or practiced in the process of discovery.

We hardly ever find ourselves sitting still,
so it's easy to imagine that our wonder

would have its limits, that we would easily fall
back inside our schedules and our tasks at hand
and the familiar ways we choose to name our time.