#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Tree Bark

“Silence is one part of speech, the war cry
of wind down a mountain pass another.
A stranger’s voice echoing through lonely
valleys, a lover’s voice rising so close
it’s your own tongue: these are keys to cipher,
the way the high hawk’s key unlocks the throat
of the sky and the coyote’s yip knocks
it shut, the way the aspens’ bells conform
to the breeze while the rapid’s drum defines
resistance. . .”

— Excerpt from "Language," a poem by Camille T. Dungy, FROM BLACK NATURE: FOUR CENTURIES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN NATURE POETRY EDITED BY CAMILLE T. DUNGY

Read the entire poem, "Language,” by Camille T. Dungy here.

Inexplicable, hopeful moments happen.

Frank calls up to me, I am writing on my computer. It is lunchtime. He is interrupting me. I sense it’s for a good reason. He wants to show me something I won’t want to miss. It is happening quickly; may be gone, in fact, before I reach the bottom of the stairs. I am moving quickly. To the window at his desk, this is where he’s pointing, to the branch on the flowering dogwood, to the five fledglings, tiny, gray and white winged fluffballs with beaks, sitting wing to wing in a warm crush of feathers, as if they are looking in the window, at him, at us. How fast the mother is, winging in, depositing in a microsecond some insect into an open beak. It is lunchtime; she is feeding them all. And Frank runs for the girls and for Will, and then the five of us are at the window in awe, at lunchtime. Hungry, being fed.

The results of two autopsies are in. I believe the independent one:

The independent autopsy says Floyd died of "asphyxiation from sustained pressure" when his neck and back were compressed by Minneapolis police officers during his arrest last week. The pressure cut off blood flow to his brain, that autopsy determined. [CNN}