"Crossing the Rubicon of ancestors..."

Our first snow, here on the southern edge of Ontario, started falling on Saturday, mid-afternoon. I welcomed it. The colours of autumn had diminished into barren trees and dried up leaves. A blanket of white was much needed.

While the big, wet snowflakes fell, I was having a phone meeting with author, poet and essayist, Sean Arthur Joyce, 3,300 kilometres away in British Columbia.

We were talking about how the dead send signs that they are not too dead after all. Sean had been moved by the story I shared of my late wife's promise to send me an owl within 40 days of her death.

Sean told me how another bird, a raven, had visited him en route to his mother's funeral. His mother had died slowly of a lung disease, which left her limping and in a walker for the last years of her life. Upon boarding a ferry, a limping raven followed Sean's vehicle, as he relates in his poem "Visitation"...

Raven sashays down the ferry deck, hip
disjointed; stops at every car
to peer hopefully at drivers encased

in steel and glass...

When the raven finally stopped at Sean's car, he offered her food, but she showed no interest...

...Crossing the Rubicon of ancestors,
did she need one final goodbye,
one last look? Choose a Raven, track

me down? And were crumbs all
I had to offer her? Too late,
far too late we learn.

By the end of our phone call, the first snowfall of the year had done its winter miracle, turning death and decay into frozen purity. What else to do but head out into woodland magic — in search of ravens and owls...

You can read the rest of "Visitation" and Sean Arthur Joyce's other poems about the COVID hysteria, nature and death, in his book, Diary of a Pandemic Year.

—John C. A. Manley

PS And if you missed the post about my wife Nicole's visitation, please read An Owl From Heaven.

---

---

---