sleeping dinosaurs

To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child’s soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man’s wisdom for the child’s.

– Johan Huyzinga, Homo Ludens^⁠1

Here in Oaxaca, every evening just before sundown, as I sit practicing my banjo by the living room window, a flock of pure white birds rises in loose groups and flutters southward, catching the young moonlight on many wings. Each morning, just as the sun begins to glow over the same eastern mountains, after we’ve finished sitting and the only sound is the coffee dripping in the dark kitchen, the same flock returns.

The other night I pointed them out to my eight year old son when we were up on the roof watching the full moon rise over mountains he calls “the sleeping dinosaurs”.  He said “they look like flower petals blown by the wind.”  His eyes, his words transformed birds flying over mountain sides into flower petals blown across the bodies of giant sleeping dinosaurs.  And I will never see them the same way again.

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¹ Johan Huyzinga, Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon, 1955), p. 119.

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