Love, is,
A nest full of hot feathers,
Splayed feet,
Wide-eyed possibility.

Before you know it
You are up there
On the edge
Of dried grasses, moss, feathers, and fur,
Spider silk, mud, saliva, twigs. You are
A Golden Plover nestled in lichen,
A Burrowing Sand Martin,
A White-breasted Nuthatch
Your head emerging boldly
From your tree cavity
Surveying the world.

You are a teeny being
Overflowing with enthusiasm,
Leaping about, twittering excitedly,
Standing on the heads of siblings
Competing for the first or best morsel
Dropped into your beak.

Until, one unexpected morning,
You decide to take that unbelievable leap.
Having never flown before but
With so many millennia of genetic sensibility,
You open
Those magical spectacular wings,
And let go.

May you make it through those first days
My beautiful one,
Not gobbled by another creature,
As you are crawling up the bark of a tall tree
Digging into the ground with your back to the sun,
Catching dragonflies midair.

May you wrestle yourself from near doom
My beautiful one
Soaring ever soaring
Higher and higher.

How many fluffy feathered ones
Leap off the edge of the only place they have ever known
Flying blindly into
Fields and forests
Of what?

What compels us out into the world
Beyond the self?
What madness,
What passion,
What hunger,
What hope,
What kind of faith?

What allows us,
All the while,
To maintain our innate knowing,
Even in light of
Our initial disbelief,
Over the utter and endless vastness
Of the sky?

© Susan Lynn Gesmer

There Is A Poem, Within

February 2015