Black Drongo Returns

Black Drongo Returns

Suddenly

In my vision

Black Drongo

Alights upon the power line.

He is back.

Unannounced, inscrutable, silent,

A presence of awareness has returned,

Whence we do not know;

Nor can we know where he has been,

What visitations he has graced

Upon whom and where.

We can think perhaps from the north,

From across the mountain peaks.

I do not know.

Yet every year, I am starkly aware:

Black Drongo has returned.

Not just one, but several.

Here and there they sit, watching.

Sometimes, they gather,

A small conference on the power line,

Before my window where I sit

To contemplate the Absolute Source,

Within which Black Drongo sits,

Black against the lightening sky.

A presence aware.

But being black and known from far,

Where he looks and what he sees

I cannot tell, can only guess.

Yet his presence says to me,

Almost formless though he is,

That the pure awareness of absolute being

Knows everywhere.

And when Black Drongo returns,

With his accompanying sages,

Indistinguishable in dark raiment,

I think of them as not a group

Of silent sages sitting, watching, knowing,

But as one.

One Black Drongo.

And each year, every time,

I am stopped in my doing.

And I contemplate

The silent, impenetrable knowing,

Who, though everywhere,

Appears in knowingness

Upon my power line.

Black Drongo!

Namaste!

11 September 2023