One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

by Olivia Hawker

People—men especially—hid their thoughts and their hearts behind thick, stoic walls, a dense blank-white nothingness, a silent room, a distant stare. Men hid what they couldn’t control till the burden of that featureless mask grew too much to bear, and then they threw it off and broke it with a shout or a swinging fist. Or a rifle shot at the riverside. Then they picked up the pieces of their unreadable disguise and fitted them back together and donned the mask again.

Every seed puts down roots in its own time and grows to its greenest power.

The seasons don’t cease to change because we haven’t the time to plant or tend or harvest, because grief like a hailstorm comes up sudden and frightens us with its noise. Once the storm rolls on, the fields remain, and life goes on, whatever we prefer.

So you hardened yourself and hoped the fear couldn’t touch you. But once you’ve turned yourself to stone, love can’t reach you, either.

Each had taken up the truths they had trained themselves to see, drinking anger and hate or loneliness and despair as eagerly as the summer-parched prairie drank the rain.

whatever a body expects their life to be, that’s what they’ll make of it in the end.

It’s winter that raises the apple from the earth. The bitter cold, the ice like knives, the crystals of ice underground that cut into the hard coat and breach the soft, pale place inside where root and stem and leaf are one. The apple won’t be coddled. Until it knows true suffering, the seed won’t sprout at all. The tree will never live.

One for the blackbird, one for the crow, one for the cutworm, and one to grow.

God is said to be great, the worm told me, so great you cannot see Him. But God is small, with hands like threads, and they reach for you everywhere you go. The hands touch everything—even you, even me. What falls never falls; what grows has grown a thousand times, and will live a thousand times more. Wherever hand touches hand, the Oneness comes to stay. Once God has made a thing whole, it cannot be broken again.