How You Know

Everyone first hears the news as a child,
surrounded by money-changers and pharisees;
then later, from gray trees on a winter day,
amid all the twittering, one flash of sound
escapes along a creek--some fanatic among
the warblers broken loose like a missionary
sent out to the hinterland, and though the doors
that open along the creek stay closed for the cold,
and the gray people in their habitats don't look out,
you--a homeless walker stabbed by that bird cry--
stop mid-stride because out of a thicket
that little tongue turns history loose again, and holy
days asleep in the calendar wake up and chime.
~William Stafford