Three Poems by John Brantingham

Miracles near Cherry Creek

 

Today’s miracle is that last night’s rain melted the snow. All that water flowed downhill until the marsh flooded up to where I stand at the side of the road, little waves lapping my shoes, the sound of a heron echoing off tree trunks around me. Today’s miracle is the tiny rings of raindrops on the surface of the marsh, and the dance they make in my eyes. Today’s miracle is me, here, in this place thinking about rain and herons and marshes. Today’s miracle is the living now, precious and real as every other moment I have ever known.

 

Monday Afternoon Crows

 

I got caught up watching crows mobbing a hawk that had probably thought about raiding their nest. I was thinking crows are mind readers. They can tell a friend from 100 yards off, and I was smirking at myself for that silly thought when I saw twilight had come down hard all around me. Here I was out in a strange woods, a mile from my car. I was fine, but I thought this wouldn’t be such a bad way to die, thinking about the world of the canopy layer. Maybe, I’d ascend up there. Maybe, watch over the nest.

 

Now that Spring Is Back

 

Now that even the puddles in drainage ditches have thawed, I can feel the eyes of creatures in the woods watching me from the treeline -- across corn fields or my backyard. I feel them when I walk across campus or into a grocery. Sometimes I feel them watching me through my window.

I feel all of them, and I have missed them all of these months. That feeling mid-January of being alone, all of the reptiles frozen, most of the mammals asleep, so many of the birds gone south is eerie and unnatural.

It’s a comfort to have them back.

John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. He is the editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder.