Three eagle feathers
crossed oceans before they reached my hands.
One large
two smaller beside it,
like a constellation still remembering
the shape of its own becoming.
Found in Alaska,
carried first toward Hawai‘i,
toward volcanic earth and salt air,
toward the island that once taught me
how to walk barefoot into uncertainty
without losing myself.
But that year
my body became another geography.
Another climate to survive.
And so the feathers waited for me
between worlds—
crossing the Pacific,
crossing absence,
crossing the long interior distance
between who I had been
and who I was becoming.
From Hawai‘i to New York City
they traveled sealed in darkness,
yet arrived carrying sky.
North of I—
there is a place where direction
stops being a map
and becomes listening.
Where the medicine wheel turns inward.
Where east and west dissolve
inside the chambers of the heart.
Where the gravitational hymn
that holds the earth beside the sun
is the same unseen force
that breathes us through grief,
through waiting,
through return.
I think of the eagle
riding invisible currents
it does not question.
I think of how light
sometimes survives by hiding itself
inside the dark.
And I wonder
if these feathers were never meant
to symbolize flight at all,
but trust.
Three quiet witnesses
laid across my palms
one for the body,
one for the spirit,
one for the part of me
still learning
how to navigate
without leaving itself behind.
North of I
there is no arrival.
Only the great inward turning
the moment the soul remembers
it has always been held
by the same forces
that spin galaxies,
lift wings,
and keep even the broken-hearted
in perfect orbit.
—Malwina Buldys
