A Shepherd Waits

 

The electric lines

sing with a twang.

So we begin the night watch

for new lambs.

 

It is early in the season yet

so mostly

we hear

bold emptiness.

 

The loudest silence

I know

is the perfect nothing

of the vigil

before the lambstorm.

 

We practice observing

what we cannot note,

an apprehension

unborn,

alive in the vigil,

alive in the ewe,

a perfect unstorm

silent as memory

remembering

one bleat

or two

and sometimes three.

 

But not tonight.

I hear only

the frozen electric on the wire,

the constellations slinging their myths,

and the burping cuds

of the quotidien sheep.

The  shepherd waits

as midwife and husband

beyond time and tide and sleep.