A Deep River Year
 September 3, 2014  

The trip is short, not more than a half an hour or so, down this beautiful river to the place of wonders.   We were invited again this year to travel by boat with friends to witness the great murmuration of swallows.  Each year, beginning at the end of August, a majestic flock of tree swallows makes its way south on its annual migration.   And here, in the long reeds of an estuary island near the mouth of the Connecticut River, they come to make a nightly roost.   As we ride the tidal current, we wait for the hour of sunset, when perhaps half a million birds gather from miles around.   We watch them, circling overhead in dancing waves of life, moving as if they were one great winged creature, guided by some invisible force.  Then they drop silently, suddenly, and it is over.   The sun applauds, painting the water vermillion and rose, as we turn for home.

Out on the river, there is a kind of silence in spite of the boat’s motor.     The wind is loud, and conversation is difficult.    And the deep water beating at the sides of the boat collapses into a mighty rush of foam in our wake.    But the silence is of the world away from us, the quiet of gulls overhead, and muted laughter from a passing schooner.   It is as if the world holds its breath again as the color drains away into an exuberance of stars.

And here we are caught again in the great cycles of time and life.    This is the season of the annual migration of swallows, whose ancestors made this trip over the ages, answering a call as powerful to them as it is mysterious to us.   But we live amid a host of such mighty forces, too:   that little ache in the heart as summer moves into autumn once again;  the ebb and flow of the ocean’s tide against a waxing moon;  the great motion of constellations as Orion rises in the September sky;  the migration of children back to school; and the unremitting procession of death and birth, change and decay that mark all joy, all sadness.   This is our river, and tonight we feel the ancient call to return again to a place where, for a while, we can roost.

Carry Me Home, Old River

Carry me home, old River,

to the place I have never been,
that place to which I always return.
Sing to me a ballad I can remember,
a song of stars and wind and tide,
a serenade as true as moonlight
when the moon is nowehere to be seen.
Often I have sung my own song,
taken my own singular path
against the traffic of the world.
But in the evening
I feel the pull of blood and tide,
wish to join the tender migration
that binds the starfish and the stars.
So I come to you, boatless,
wishing to bend to your water,
to dip my hands, shoulders, body into your life,
to ride your silver stream
and feel its whisper and thrum,
tuning my own heartbeat to its rhythm.
I seek the place beyond seeing,
the island where the swallows rest,
the place both salt and fresh
at the meeting of all waters,
the ancient home where life begins and ends
in peace.
Carry me there, old River.

--Timothy Haut, September 3, 2014