The Box Revisited

I am getting older now and live alone but for the company of a blue and gold macaw named Sweetheart who inspired me to write the poem 'The Box' for her birthday. I raised this happy bird from a baby and in spite of my shortcomings, she has grown in size and virtues of vigilance, honesty, bravery, tenacity, adaptability, forgiveness and the skill of flight. Now as she greets me each morning I am humbled by her vigorous love of life and as we stand at the window and she calls out, I cant help but wonder if the sound reaches beyond the distant hills to a place where it is still the morning of life. A place where the macaws of the Amazon come together in a cacophony of living rainbows with voices that echo as if nature had intended to speak. It must be there in these wild cathedrals that the sights and sounds arrest the mind in silent invocation, and hold transfixed in wonder, all who witness. The wild macaws are still with us as we nightly visit them in sleep, but they are somewhere off in the distance now, traveling toward an empty horizon as are she and I.