three mornings

In Istanbul, my ears

three mornings heard the early call to prayer.

At fuller light, heard birds then,

water birds and tree birds, birds of migration.

Like three knowledges,

I heard them: incomprehension,

sweetened distance, longing.

When the body dies, where will they go,

those migrant birds and prayer calls,

as heat from sheets when taken from a dryer?

With voices of the ones I loved,

great loves and small loves, train wheels,

crickets, clock-ticks, thunder—where will they,

when in fragrant, tumbled heat they also leave?

~ Jane Hirshfield

from harvard divinity school