 Don't click Bernardo Wade's picture above because, if you do, you'll be whisked away to his excellent poem "Another (Damn) Crow Poem" over at Crazyhorse, soon to be known as swamp pink. The reason you don't want to click over and read the poem is because it will remind you how lonely you are. Sure the poem's about watching a murder of crows take off in harmonious flight from a late autumn tree. And, sure, the lines are delivered with melodious grace and musical infection: Once the leaves abandon the tree, the crows, who seem to sense the loneliness of a limb, rise up like musical notes syncopated by the brisk winter wind... Wade goes on to describe the familial gathering of birds with a sense of detached intimacy: I watch them huddle close like strange fruit nestling warmth—the survival of kin. He then concludes that crows don't deserve their reputation as birds of ill omen, or as thieves, or tricksters. After-all, they don't have loving mothers, probably never experience tenderness, or gentleness, and everyone associates them with spooky things. So, why in the world should this make you feel lonely? Well, because Wade's played a brilliant trick here. The conclusion of the poem that describes the negative things we associate with crows actually applies to ourselves. The things that he imagines the crows not having are our own lacks. The giveaway is in the stanza quoted above, where the crows huddle together and endure. They are part of the music of nature, no matter how harsh or dangerous it may appear to us. We are the lonely crows. When Wade writes: I wonder if the mother crow sits her chicks down to impart the resilience behind black wings, He already knows the answer: he has already acknowledged natural instinct and the rhythms of nature all through the preceding poem. Crows don't need loving lectures; but people do. IS seeing love in the circle of nature, through the portent of a murder of crows, a warning that we're out of harmony with nature? Absolutely. So this poem is a call for what might restore us to the music of nature. To embrace ourselves, our families, our friends, and society as a whole... as a murder. But with deepest love. @BlackstonDan Categories All
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