Sunday Beauty - a poem & four feather photographs by Jada Griffin
In the metaphorical realm, finding a feather in your path means an angel is watching over you, and placed a feather there to relay a special message. This feather calls upon the recipient to be still and quiet, to listen and pay attention. Feathers are beautiful and a part of the tapestry of the natural world to which people belong. I have a thing for feathers, more than anything because they symbolize the freedom and courage of flying birds, birds that cross great distances over land and water, sometimes without descending for thousands of miles. Theirs is the freedom and courage of the open and connected wild-animal brain, as hot, flowing and flexible as the magma within earth herself, a freedom and courage that only true liberty brings. I always keep the loveliest of the feathers I discover, whether they be pure-white seabird feathers from the Oregon coast that is so dear to my heart, black-and-white magpie feathers from the High Desert, or dark-grey raven feathers from near Nambe and Pojoaque Pueblos where I live at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in New Mexico. Corvids are particularly fascinating to me because, when you are around them, they exhibit an unexpected intelligence that is beguiling. A flock of a dozen or so magpies appears to have befriended me for reasons other than the scraps of food I put out for them in the early morning. If I don’t show up in timely fashion, fledglings and adults alike call out to me seemingly just to say, “Hello!” Like shamans, they hold space as if they were messengers between two worlds - the physical world that I am familiar with, and a different world of the spirit that is felt and yearned for, but not seen. I never grow tired of finding magpie feathers, and I dialogue with them, asking them why they have come. I hope you enjoy reading Sunday Beauty and the four photographs that follow. They are birthed from the landscapes I love. If you care to, email me your messages. I would love to hear them!
Sunday Beauty
Tell me from how far this feather drifted down,
circling, circling,
circling above a corn field,
riding the inside curve of an invisible thermal,
until landing softly at my feet on the dusty road?
From what distance did no other feather float
atop sound waves pitched out of some heavenly Tewa drum,
skin strung tight and wide,
reverberating thunder, thunder,
thunder barely accessible to human hearing,
like the songs of whales navigating glassy sea valleys of aquamarine?
“Resembles a crow feather!” an ornithologist exclaims, “Was it black?”
Black magic African flesh,
stars silhouetted and twinkling against you.
As you descend, nothing remains but light.
A dark, infinite, unknowable void goes on forever.
Crow, Ute, Cheyene, Arapahoe, Coeur D’Alene.
What color are people?
Sunday Beauty,
in my imagination
you are lapis lazuli,
shape-shifted artistically,
midnight the way my heart feels,
the melancholy note of a cello,
pulled and stretched by a bow,
glided forever across a string,
easy, like smoke.
No matter how many skies have fallen,
remember, remember,
remember to see yourself the way you are.
You are poetry, you whisper,
invention bonded only by the limits of creative power.
Blue within black.
A Sunday Beauty
feather, feather, feather.
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Sunday Beauty, photograph by Jada Griffin, June 28th, 2020, New Mexico, near Pojoaque Pueblo.
White Feather, photograph by Jada Griffin, October 21st, 2019, Oregon coast near Yachats.
Sparrow’s Nest with Magpie Feathers, photograph by Jada Griffin, New Mexico, 2020
Ephemeral, photograph by Jada Griffin, June 30th, 2020, on the road to Nambe, New Mexico.