Fragments of Cassandra

There are birds that arrive with thunder.
Birds draped in bright feathers,
demanding the sky remember their names.

The mourning bird is not one of them.
It arrives softly.

Like a memory opening a forgotten door.
Like a hand resting on the shoulder
of someone who has carried too much for too long.

Its song is not beautiful
in the way rivers are beautiful,
or wildflowers,
or summer light.

Its beauty belongs to another kingdom.
The beauty of old letters.
The beauty of scars.
The beauty of surviving.

It sings as though it has swallowed both grief and grace
and found no reason to separate them.

The sound drifts through the morning air-
A prayer with broken wings.
A lullaby for the lonely.
A hymn sung by the space;
between losing and letting go.

Some believe mourning birds are messengers.
Not because they speak.
But because they understand.
Because they appear
when hearts become cathedrals of absence,
when silence grows heavy enough to have a pulse.

And somehow,
without asking questions,
they remind us:

love is not buried with what leaves.
It lingers.
In empty chairs.
In familiar songs.
In the sunlight that still reaches the floor where someone once stood.
In the ache that remains
because something beautiful was here.

The mourning bird knows this.
That grief is simply love
with nowhere obvious to land.

So it carries both.
The wound and the wonder.
The ending and the echo.
The sorrow and the sacredness.

Perched between earth and eternity,
it sings.

And the song says what every grieving soul
has spent centuries trying to put into words:

Nothing loved is ever truly lost.
It only learns how to fly differently.



Be’ahava,
The Mourning Bird