I think every writer and every painter has been inspired by rivers or mountains or valleys or such sights of the natural world. This post tells the tale of a bird.
Every writer and painter has in their memory at least one moment and one thought or image that captures their imagination and provides inspiration for their work. Every writer and every painter reading this post remembers such a scene and such a pristine, unforgettable moment that occurred in their youth, middle age, or old age.
They return to the scene innumerable times in their imagination where a storehouse of words and images are kept because that scene and that moment are breathtaking. However long they walk the earth they will never forget that day, that moment.
Spiritual Moment: Bird Rising From a Field
I was out in western United States, 1,500 miles from home. I had been thumbing car rides and boarding freight trains starting from my Midwest home in Chicago. From travel I was filthy with dirt, dust, grease, and cow manure from box cars, flat cars, and coal cars, and why should I care? I wasn’t trying to win the heart of a lovely dark-haired girl with a captivating smile. I was alone and I was on the road where you rely on your brains and your luck under circumstances when life is arduous.
I don’t remember where my traveling buddy Nick was, but he was not with me. He might have gone on to New York. I don’t remember because it was a long time ago. We were seventeen, just out of high school, in a period of a few precious years when we humans have a hunger for experiences we’ve never known because we are granted the pleasures, the adventures, and the intrigues of life so briefly.
The Bird’s Ascent
For a long time as I waited for a ride from the first car to stop there was no movement anywhere in sight–just total stasis, and no cars on the road at the moment I saw the bird. There were no sounds, just silence. I felt no loneliness as you often feel on the road alone, and no fear at all though I was far from home and young and had a treasure of only four dollars in my pocket to sustain me. Where would I eat and sleep tonight? Tommorow night?
The world of riding freight trains is dangerous, populated by many dangerous men you learn to be aware of. If something were to happen to me and I were to die in this unforgivable way of life no one would ever know what happened to me. My parents would grieve for their lost boy the rest of their lives. But I felt safe there that day; every feature of that day was perfect: a perfect day. The setting around me was like a painting–there were fields of unmoving wheat as far as I could see that were gold in the sunlight, the sky an indigo blue. The purest white puffy clouds drifted westward on a breath of wind.
Behind me and to my left there was a crackling sound and the cry of a bird. I immediately turned and looked in that direction. It was a big bird, larger than a hawk–pitch black in color, the wings shiny–with bright vermillion on the underside of the wings. The bird rose slowly out of the field, its wings fluttering noisily as if crying to the wheat, “Let me go. Let me out.”
Then there was a sound of a wind thrashing the wheat fields, rippling the fields in great waves like breakers tumbling upon a beach. Looking, listening, alone, no fear, feeling joy, free, that was the loveliest moment in my life. Only I had seen the bird. There was no one near enough to see it, only I–the bird with the flaming red wings coming from out of the field against a background of no other movement but the wind-blown fields, and no one else on earth to witness its flight. I now in a car bound for California saw in the bird the beauty that from childhood a writer is always hoping to convey in their writing, the beauty a painter always hopes to paint.
Here is my poem that is inspired by that bird:
Mystical Bird
I admire rising from the field before me
A magnificent black bird whose wings open wide
And show a brilliant vermillion on the underside,
That shrieks with delight as it takes flight.
To live as happily as I wish I might
My soul must be
As a bird that rises joyfully
From fields of gold.
© 2025 David J. Rogers
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