Barred Owl Over a Holler

A striped ghost sits atop a pine,

claws anchored on rigged bark.

Obsidian eyes scan a thicket,

tracking movement through damp brush.

A sudden, rhythmic booming

tears through humid blackness.

Cadence shakes a valley,

shouting into dark.

Who cooks for you?

Call vibrates, raw,

staking a claim to night.

🦉

He drops from a branch,

falling toward earth

to pull back at a last second.

Wide wings carry him through woods,

moving with a terrifying lack of sound.

He is a king of deep timber,

pursuing small lives among shadows.

Moonlight catches his barred body,

brown streaks across a hunter.

He belongs only to the woods,

owning a wild world

where stars watch him hunt.

🦉

And still, something softens

around him, or maybe around me.

🦉

Because even this fierce life

must wake each night

to hunger,

to rough bark beneath talons,

to endless searching.

🦉

He calls again,

and this time it drifts farther,

spreading through the holler,

touching whatever stirs or hides.

🦉

What is it to belong so completely

to darkness and motion,

to take and be sustained,

to vanish and return again and again

as if no boundary could hold you.

🦉

He moves through woods

as though every path has already been written,

as though each rise and holler

waits for him to arrive.

🦉

Watching, I feel my own place

settle into me,

light but certain.

🦉

I am here for a moment,

breathing,

looking up,

trying to understand a life

that asks only to continue.

🦉

Another call,

fading now across distance,

and something in me listens

long after sound has thinned away.

🦉

Night goes on.

🦉

And he, somewhere beyond sight,

continues,

perfect but unseen,

exactly as he must be.