Sunday September 22, 2024. First day of Autumn.

As I was walking up the drive from my mother’s house I heard a call, distant, that I had not heard in a year.

It took a few seconds to place it. It was a bugle of Sandhill cranes. Their rattle can be heard from two and half miles away.

I looked up and in the blue sky I picked out the V shaped line of Sandhills migrating southwest to their wintering grounds.

I had just come from my stepfather’s room in a memory care facility in Grass Valley. I had been with him near the end. So had my mother.

I was there, someone had to be, as he left this room of nine months on his final migration.

Someone had to be there and I was.

So I wrote a poem and illustrated it.

Steve. 9.22.24

Bugle calls

in clear blue

draws my eyes skyward

a clarion call

of season’s change.

I pick out the southwest

bound flying V-

looking now like a

comma

punctuating

a beginning, an end.

Godspeed Steve, Godspeed