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| Courtesy Nick Dunlop* |
By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)
They descend, tens then hundreds then thousands,
Their mass of tiny wingbeats flattening the bamboo canopy into sparse strands,
Like a helicopter gunship, searching a jungle for prey.
Aggressive and raucous, choosing bullying over tact,
They force the others to the edges of what was their home tract:
“This is our thicket now.”
The cardinals, the sparrows, the jays,
Birds of far different ways,
Forced to cluster together in the few available spots,
While the starlings call the shots.
As dusk begins to darken the sky,
A shrill cry screams from on high,
The cardinal, the sparrow, the jay,
Know to hunker down, not to give themselves away.
But the starlings know better,
Reinforcing bravado with collective chatter,
The launch their murmuration,
Sure it will repel this irritation.
Unfazed and unimpressed, the peregrine awaits,
A heat-seeking missile of a bird, well able to impose its own dictates.
It target locks a starling at the edge of the undulating mass,
In an explosion of bloodied feathers, takes it down in one pass.
The starlings continue their amorphous flight,
Still sure it will rule the night,
The peregrine strikes again, like a fighter jet plane,
Sending another bird to the ground, little more than a bloody stain.
Realizing the murmurings they told each other may be untrue,
The starlings dive back to the bamboo,
The peregrine lands nearby, its dinner overdue,
Ripping off a head, it dines in full view.
They ascend, tens, thousands, millions,
Their mass of loud voices and absurd conjuration,
Reinforcing their collective hallucination.
Choosing the power of loud and fat,
Over science and fact,
Shouting down those they consider overly educated and too high-brow,
“This is our country now.”
Spurred on by their delusional superiority,
Much like the starlings’ imagined authority,
Ignoring they have the same problem with air power inferiority.
So they rage about, knocking down doors and kicking in gates,
Confident in imagined power that knowledge only complicates,
Arrogantly unaware that their peregrine awaits.
_______________* And an unrelated video from a BBC news story [December, 19, 2018] showing a peregrine falcon attacking a starling murmuration at a Suffolk nature reserve:
| Copyright © 2021 by Paul Clark |
This is a magnificent poem. Absolutely wonderful. The rhythm, the rhyming, the message, just perfect. Bravo!
ReplyDeleteEric, thank you for the very kind words. Coming from you, I regard that as high praise indeed. paul
DeleteI have always loved watching murmurations across the sky. As far as the political allegory, it comes across a bit angry and violent over a difference of opinions. Who is right and who is wrong will surely be argued out over and over, but this country is large enough for the voices of grackles and that of the cardinals, jays, sparrows and peregrine too. With the influx of new people over our borders will come new ideas that will also fly free. This country is ever evolving.
ReplyDeleteMaik, brave of you to stand up for the possible rightness of insurrectionists! Are you sure?
DeleteIt is not in defense of insurrection. If someone has done something illegal, then by all means they should be tried by the laws of the land. I do not believe that all the 70 million people on one side are insurrectionist, just as I don’t believe the 75 million on the other side are all pure of heart. There are good and bad people all around us. Having free speech and ideas does not create a good or bad person, just people who can try to come together and form better ideas as a whole.
ReplyDeleteThanks for that needed clarification! I myself, as good a person as I am generally thought to be (I hope), have my badnesses.
DeleteMichael, following up on the political implications of your other statements. Yes, this country is big enough to accommodate all voices, but only to a point. If 75% of people believe in the rule of law and support efforts to end acts of hatred and racism, but 25% refuse to abandon their doctrine of racism and hate, do we really have space in the country, or in our hearts and minds, to continue to accommodate them? If 75% believe in facts and legal elections and the other 25% refuses to accept either, how exactly would you suggest we accommodate that 25%?
DeleteOur situation is not that far removed from Afghanistan: the government of that country ordained that it was legal for girls to go to school; most people in that country believe girls should go to school, yet the Taliban still act as if they have a right to board school buses and shoot girls for daring to go to school. Should Afghanistan accommodate the Taliban by establishing a quota, allowing them to kill "only" 100 schoolgirls a year, or 200, or 1000? That is basically a simplified version of the deal 75% of the people in this country have been trying to make with the other 25% for at least 200 years.
If 25% of the people in this country want to continue to support and violently defend beliefs that brought us slavery, the American Civil War, the Mexican-American War, the Jim Crow South, lynching of black people, the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, the long-fought war over school desegregation, and the January 6 attack on our Capitol, is it maybe time for that 25% to find another place to live, so the 75% can finally live in peace and progress?
I'm glad you stand for taking legal action against those who do something illegal; I stand for stopping them before they do something illegal.
I'm not sure the poem is standing up for the "possible rightness" of anyone, Morris. But the desire to fly free is in all of us, regardless of the dangers. I think a poem that speaks to that desire can help us to empathize with one another. Alas, we are not one flock any more. Perhaps we never were. There is, in this poem, a nostalgia for the flock and its beauty, not just its distain for science and fact (and, most likely, me).
ReplyDeleteEric, ??? My “rightness” comment was NOT about the poem; I was questioning one of Maik’s comments.
DeleteIf I interpreted this correctly you are comparing this wonderful nature of birds to the ugly, violent side of the human race?
ReplyDeleteThe murmurations are beautiful unlike the murmurings of those who riot and maim.
Penelope, thank you for the comments. A bit of back story.
DeleteWhen I was a child, we had massive flocks of starlings roost in our pine trees much of the winter. When they would take their evening flight and transform into their murmuration, it was amazing to watch. Cedar waxwings would behave similarly, but on a much smaller scale.
When the starlings took over our bamboo thicket this February, it was the first time I had seen so many of them in decades. When they rose up to challenge a peregrine flying overhead, I thought they surely wouldn’t be dumb enough to make that mistake twice. While I am in general a great fan of idealism and Quixotic efforts, the reality of 50 mile-per-hour birds taking on a 200 mile-per-hour peregrine seemed a senseless endeavor, and it turned out with predictable results. That's where the original version of the poem ended, with the peregrine eating freshly killed starlings in full view of the survivors.
When the starlings did this night after night, it seemed insanity. All they accomplished was to leave the safety of the bamboo, get a bunch of starlings killed, then return to the safety of the bamboo. Why not just stay in the safety of the bamboo until the peregrine left?
Which got me to thinking about a comparison, and I thought of the January 6 Capitol riot. These would-be insurrections were so delusional they thought they could overthrow a government without overwhelming air support, thus the comparison to the starlings' flailing efforts against the peregrine.
As for the beauty of the murmuration: Yes. As for the beauty of starlings in general: No. They are hyper-aggressive cavity-dwellers who out compete bluebirds and a wide variety of woodpeckers, to the point other species are sometimes extirpated across wide regions by the starlings' dominating numbers and aggressive actions. In that regard, they are unfortunately quite similar to loud-mouth protesters defying norms as they riot and maim.
I tend to be a sinner too, but I try to be more positive than negative overall. Hopefully it balances.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your back story however I can’t agree regarding the similarities as nature has instilled this act into the birds for whatever reason - I suspect to learn the valuable lesson that only the strong and fast survive!
ReplyDeleteNature understands the circle of life whereas man wants to reinvent it in his thinking of being superior!
What January 6th showed to me and the World is the ugly face of man, a riot, an insurrection with violence and NOTHING about that was beautiful or educating!
Penelope, when I sent the poem to Moristotle, I did so with the remark that I hoped "the Audubon Society, or similar, would not attempt to charge me with defamation for comparing starlings to radical rightists." Your comments reinforce my concerns.
ReplyDeleteNot sure why I’ve enforced your concerns as clearly your poem was meant to compare Nature vs Man or was the latter part of your poem an after thought? In which case surely that was meant to invoke comparisons?
ReplyDeleteGreat rhyme scheme, great rhythm, just an excellent poem--thanks for sharing with all of us.
ReplyDeleteMichael, thank you for your comments. I am frequently in awe of the quantity and quality of work you create; when I write something you feel earns a comment, I feel I have created something worthy. Thanks again.
DeleteI just want to reiterate my great admiration for this poem. My second comment was in reply to a comment from Morris. I could see HIS comment before I could see the comment he was responding to (something to do with the site's spam protections). I thought Morris had seen something in the poem that I had not (wouldn't be the first time). Glad to know I was mistaken, as I found out today. Note that I still wanted to defend the poem, in spite of a possible misreading on my part (which turned out to not be the case). I am a great admirer of beauty, especially beauty within the constraints of form. This is the kind of poem I wish I had written. That's my last word on the matter! Hat's off to the poet!
ReplyDeleteEric, again, thank you for your comments in general, and such high praise in particular. As a professional writer, I published thousands of articles in hundreds of venues, but like many writers: I always wished I had the skill and mental toughness to be a poet. There is something about the concise demands of poetry, where every word seems to equal at least 10 words (or maybe 100) in other forms of writing, that - from a writer's perspective - makes the idea of poetry appealing, yet daunting. For those of us who often struggle to delete 10 words from a 1,000-word article to make it meet an assigned space, the idea of writing something where you are basically under a self-imposed curfew to throw out 900 words out of 1,000, is an almost masochistic pursuit.
ReplyDeleteI usually work up the nerve to attempt a couple of poems a year; inspired by the positive feedback on 'Murmurations' I may attempt three this year.