SNOW BUNTINGS

A light dusting of snow is predicted for tomorrow. Although I do not
make my home in the prairie-flatland of Minnesota's (and North Dakota's
and Canada's!) Red River Valley, whenever it snows at this time of year,
my memories return to that child-hood landscape and the gift of hearing
and seeing wandering flocks of Snow Buntings. As an early teen-ager,
I would take winter walks out into the fields,  just to see what I might see
(as I dutifully recorded in my brown, Spiral Notebook.)

Just today, I took out that now tattered and yellowing-page notebook,
and re-read what I had written upon seeing a flock of Snow Buntings.
One phrase, in my scriggley handwriting (with misspelled words, of
course!) was they are as the snow themselves.

I have since discovered that Snow Buntings breed and nest in the Arctic
and are the most northern small bird to do so. (In winter, they wander
as far south as they have to, in order to find food.) 

I would share with you one of my favorite poems I wrote four years ago.
That old, brown Spiral notebook was open alongside my, then brand new
computer keyboard. That  poem is to be found somewhere in the middle
of my first published book of poetry, Prairie Sky, Prairie Ground, and
contains a phrase that gave the book its title. 



Snow Buntings

They come like arctic gusts,
drifting, sweeping over fields,
to find weed and grass seed heads
rising above snow-swept land

Dense flocks of snowflake birds
swirl in graceful evolutions, climb skyward,
turn in unison, spiraling down to land -
a joyful restlessness
among prairie sky and ground.

Rushing sounds of
white wings, at one with winter,
their unbroken flight-chorus
of chirps and purring -
sounds like laughter of
happy children.



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