The Sandhills

The language of cranes we once were told is the wind. The wind is their method, their current, the translated story of life they write across the sky. Millions of years they have blown here on ancestral longing, their wings of wide arrival, necks long, legs stretched out above strands of earth where they arrive with the shine of water, stories, interminable language of exchanges descended from the sky and then they stand, earth made only of crane from bank to bank of the river as far as you can see the ancient story made new.