Augur awakes to a morning without words. They hover just out of reach like the birds that disappear into the trees when he steps outside to get the newspaper. He cannot sprout wings and follow them, though like Icarus, he longs to rise up into the sun, waxen wings be damned.
The longing to recapture what remains on the tip of his tongue leaves him mute. He has cast so many words like seeds to the wind that he has sated generations of esurient birds. They have grown fat on his lost paragraphs. They sing his lyrics in a language he cannot understand. Pages with letters unrevealed line their hidden nests high up in the shadowed boughs of dark trees.
The First Reading
When the Words I thought Were Lost
April 11, 2020
On days when I am so lost that the words cannot find me
and the trap that is my mind will not release,
When the illumination I seek only rises to blind me
and the gap between now and not yet seems only to increase.
When my fingers cramp upon the pen of my prayers
and my compassion has been consumed by rage,
I stumble from the shadows into fields of light and air
to find the words I thought were lost shining brightly on the page.
The Second Reading
April 11, 2020
I am the window with curtains drawn.
I am the morning sun.
I am the dark room growing light.
I am the waking one.
I am the dreamer’s forgotten dreams.
I am the shadow of birds.
I am the flyer seeking seed.
I am the writer whose solace is words.
The First Listening and Final Reading
Jonathan Remix
Pour out your seeds and the birds will come.
Pour out your seeds and the birds will come.
And when they have eaten, there will still be some.
Epilogue
Augur realizes that words cannot be captured. Their very nature is expression.
And with that thought suddenly his world is alight with whirring wings. He can understand the birdsong. The sparrows alight upon his open hands with gifts of sentences.
The sky rains with words.
The Book of Augur 