TRAVEL POEM

 

 

George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana, is the author of twenty-seven books of poetry. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he taught for thirty-two years.

 

 

During a trip to Morocco with my wife, Mary Ann Cain, and two dear friends, Stephen Fredman and Barbara Black-Fredman, we came upon a stork nesting atop a building on the busy streets of Marrakech. Having just toured unearthed palaces and tombs, I found myself equally stunned by this unusual gift from the natural world. I thought of Robert Duncan’s great poem, “My Mother Would Be a Falconress,” and within a couple months wrote this as part meditation on his, even drawing upon a couple of his lines near the poem’s close.

 

 

 

 

Stork Nesting Above A Busy Street In Marrakech

 

 

Look! Barbara says. Up there! And we four

stare into the true nature of things. Mary Ann

sees it next, a stork who’s built a nest on top

of a building in the Medina. Then Steve’s eyes go

through it and beyond, back to his friend and mentor, a mother

who would be a falconress. My eyes, of course, are still

stunned from breakfast and the pouring of mint tea twelve

or thirteen inches above the cup—a way, they say,

to make foam that can catch sand that the wind

blows. Meanwhile, the street is swarming

like bees in the blood. Like termites

clouding a mound. Still, the stork

is unconcerned, as if it has rigged a raft to float

its young through a Florida swamp or among

the solitudes of a barrier reef. The antique seller

whose shop is directly below the nest

thinks we’re ready for a tiny bird

figurine, or perhaps a silver teapot to steep

our awe. And Barbara takes a photo of the nest to hold

this moment, as if the world’s opposites are themselves

whole. Could this stork be the mother of all?

Are we rebirthed unto one another just in absorbing

the tufts and twigs it has gathered in the afternoon heat?

Ramadan, and the long hours near the close of the fast. 

We westerners are still full from breakfast.

We are not empty but still waiting to be whole

like twigs torn from a tree to somehow fit a nest and await

the egg’s release? So this stork rises above each human

sorrow. Nests in the Medina, unto us, as a gift

from below? Our past deeds are dead,

and palms and flowers in the plaza garden bend into us

a striving that has bloomed? Choose a blue—any shade

of blue—and the sky might be alive? If we could

just lift from out of our blind ways of mouth, absorb

one another’s words as if from our own tongue.

Yes, our mother might be a falconress.

We dream in our little hoods with many bells

jangling when we turn our heads.

We keep striving to see, as if the nuzzling nests inside us

are not as close as deep down we know them to be.