I wake up to whiffles of swift wings, a back-and-forth of whistles and trills—a flock of starlings is alighting in the crown of the old birch tree outside my window.
Dawn light pours through the lacework of branches that still retains some fluttering, translucent leaves. The tree no longer shades my window against sunlight. Instead, it flavors the light, mixing sharp glints of lemon-yellow into the honey of the slanted morning rays.
The chattering starlings fill the tree’s crown with sound and motion. The glossy black wings bend the light; their branch-to-branch flitting scatters particles of reflections.
Suddenly, the entire flock takes flight and vanishes with an explosion of wingbeats.
I have glimpsed a dream that passed through the mind of the birch tree while it is falling into a long sleep. The glow of gold, the gleam of black will sustain the dreamer when ice seizes the ground around the roots, when darkness barbed with winter constellations fills the crown. When time itself seems to freeze, the memory of that dream will keep trickling, grain by grain, in the concealed hourglass that counts the moments till spring.
Yana Kane came to the United States as a refugee from the Soviet Union. She holds a BSE from Princeton University, a PhD in Statistics from Cornell University, and an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Literary Translation from Fairleigh Dickinson University. She is grateful to Bruce Esrig for editing her English-language texts.
