Sooner or later

Every so often a bird falls from the sky. Lone members of the great armies of birds, squadrons of feathered warriors, falling from the sky, in a slow, skinny , silent rain. We never see them fall, we never hear them land. All that remains is the decayed evidence of their soaring lives found in fields, hedgerows, wasteland, in tree branches, in the great stone plains and at the bottom of the rivers, seas and oceans.

There lives are unrecorded, their history unwritten and their magnificent and terrible journeys are forgotten and blown away. Their routes and plans, what they have seen, what they have done and the families they raised and lost make up millions of untold stories that stretch back to their dinosaur descendants.

We look up occasionally, we crane our necks to watch the weather, mask our eyes from the sun, rage at winter moons or puzzle at the cloud shapes. Outside of our narrow view they soar and dart like our own stray thoughts, never quite at rest, never quite getting anywhere. Staking a strange curved claim or forming a zig-zag geometry across the blue and then back to earth. Tiny souls searching, feeding and posting messages on wires, towers and steeples, tree branches and windowsills till the call comes to them, to fall back to earth.

Sooner or later we all fall back to earth.