Passage 
    Once more, in their dumb unknowing,
    sandhill cranes are pulled to a place
    they must again and again get back to.
    I lean on a rake and scan the sky
    for their small Chinese brush strokes arrowing blue.
    But it's their wild, wondrous sound
    that pierces me, their high trill
    more thrilling than two young deer that at dawn
    incised our lawn with their slender hooves,
    lured by the dwarf apples' windfall.

    Wherever the cranes' journey ends,
    some shoreline probed by assiduous tides,
    my garden's just another particular
    and less important than the prairies, hills
    or rivers the cranes clamor over,
    all breath and bellow and creaking pinions,
    their passage as compelled and unyielding
    as the thump a ripe apple makes
    falling. And quick
    as that sound, the cranes are here, then not.
    I'm left with dirt and rake.

    As a child, I lay awake
    in the colorless dark and waited for dawn's oncoming
    freight, its whistle's single mournful whine.
    How that last reverberating note,
    especially when it was cold, hung
    in the air of my room, our house,
    above the river thick with ice, the hills beyond.
    I didn't understand but knew.
    Not the sound, but the ache of after.

                          Deborah Cummins