Poster for a meeting of Brazilian Ornithologists in 2001 with photographs from Brazilian photographer Carlos Renato Fernandes
Dark Green Religion: Supplementary Materials
Favorites (Bird Poetry)
Poetry presented during "The Power of Bird's" session at the the 4th International Partners in Flight / Compañeros en Vuelo conference in McAllen Texas.
The Outermost House - Excerpt
Henry Beston
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
Creature to Creature
Denise Levertov
Almost too late to walk in the woods, but I did,
anyway. And stepping aside for a moment
from the shadowy path to enter
darker shadow, a favorite circle of fir trees,
received a gift from the dusk:
a small owl, not affrighted, merely
moving deliberately
to a branch a few feet
further from me, looked
full at me – a long regard,
steady, acknowledging, unbiased.
I live my life
Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)
I live my life in growing orbits,
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but I give myself to it.
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years.
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon,
or a storm, or a great song.
Lost, by David Wagoner (already provided)
The Judgment of the Birds - Excerpt
Loren Eiseley
I have said that I saw a judgment upon life, and that it was not passed by men. Those who stare at birds in cages or who test minds by their closeness to our own my not care for it. It comes from far away out of my past, in a place of pouring waters and green leaves. I shall never see an episode like it again if I live to be a hundred nor do I think that one man in a million has ever seen it, because man is an intruder into such silences. The light must be right, and the observer must remain unseen. No man sets up such an experiment. What he sees, he sees by chance.
You may put it that I had come over a mountain, that I had slogged through fern and pine needles for half a long day, and that on the edge of a little glad with one long, crooked branch extending across it, I had sat down to rest with my back against a stump. Through accident I was concealed from the glade, although I could see into it perfectly.
The sun was warm there, and the murmurs of forest life blurred softly away into my sleep. When I awoke, dimly aware of some commotion and outcry in the clearing, the light was slanting down through the pines in such a way that the glade was lit like some vast cathedral. I could see the dust motes of wood pollen in the long shaft of light, and there on the extended branch sat an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak.
The sound that awoke me was the outranged cries of the nestling’s parents, who flew helplessly in circles about the clearing. The sleek black monster was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his beak on the dead branch a moment, and sad still. Up to that point the little tragedy had followed the usual patter. But suddenly, out of all that area of woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents.
No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death.
And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable.
The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.
The Wren from Carolina
Mary Oliver
Just now the wren from Carolina buzzed
Through the neighbor’s hedge
A line of grace notes I couldn’t even write down
Much less sing.
Now he lifts his chestnut colored throat
And delivers such a cantering praise –
For what?
For the early morning, the taste of the spider,
For his small cup of life
That he drinks from every day, knowing it will refill.
All things are inventions of holiness.
Some more rascally than others.
I’m on that list too,
Though I don’t know exactly where.
But, every morning, there’s my own cup of gladness,
And there’s that wren in the hedge, above me, with his
Blazing song.
A Poem for the Blue Heron
Mary Oliver
1
Now the blue heron
wades the cold ponds
of November.
In the gray light his hunched shoulders
are also gray.
He finds scant food - a few
numbed breathers under
a rind of mud.
When the water he walks in begins
turning to fire, clutching itself to itself
like dark flames, hardening,
he remembers.
Winter.
2
I do not remember who first said to me, if anyone did:
Not everything is possible;
some things are impossible,
and took my hand, kindly,
and led me back
from wherever I was.
3
Toward evening
the heron lifts his long wings
leisurely and rows forward
into flight. He
has made his decision: the south
is swirling with clouds, but somewhere,
fibrous with leaves and swamplands,
is a cave he can hide in
and live.
4
Now the woods are empty,
the ponds shine like blind eyes,
the wind is shouldering against
the black, wet
bones of the trees.
In a house down the road,
as though I had never seen these things -
leaves, the loose tons of water,
a bird with an eye like a full moon
deciding not to die, after all -
I sit out the long afternoons
drinking and talking;
I gather wood, kindling, paper; I make fire
after fire after fire.
Hurt Hawks
Robinson Jeffers
1.
The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted
shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is
game without talons.
He stands under the oak bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers
freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity
is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble
that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
You do not know him, you communal people, or you
have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying,
remember him.
2.
I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Have nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing
that trailed under his talons when he moved.
We had fed him for six week, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the
evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the
twilight. What fell was relaxed,
Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded
river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.
The Bird and the Machine – Excerpt
Loren Eiseley
He was a sparrow hawk and a fine young male in the prime of life. I was sorry not to catch the pair of them, but as I dripped blood and folded his wings carefully, holding him by the back so that he couldn’t strike again, I had to admit the two of them might have been more than I could have handled under the circumstances. The little fellow had saved his mate by diverting me, and that was that. He was born to it and made no outcry now, resting in my hand hopelessly but peering toward me in the shadows behind the lamp with a fierce, almost indifferent glance. He neither gave nor expected mercy and something out of the high air passed from him to me, stirring a faint embarrassment. I quit looking into that eye and managed to get my huge carcass with its fist full of prey back down the ladder. I put the bird in a box too small to allow him to injure himself by struggle and walked out to welcome the arriving trucks. I had been a long day, and camp still to make in the darkness. In the morning that bird would be just another episode. He would go back with the bones in the truck to a small cage in a city where we would spend the rest of his life. And a good thing, too. I sucked my aching thumb and spat out some blood. An assassin has to get used to these things. I had a professional reputation to keep up.
In the morning with the change that comes on suddenly in that high country, the mist that had hovered below us in the valley was gone. The sky was a deep blue, and one could see for miles over the high outcroppings of stone. I was up early and brought the box in which the little hawk was imprisoned out onto the grass where I was building a cage. A wind as cool as a mountain spring ran over the grass and stirred my hair. It was a fine day to be alive. I looked up and all around and at the hole in the cabin roof out of which the other little hawk had fled. There was no sign of her anywhere that I could see.
“Probably in the next county by now,” I thought cynically, but before beginning work I decided I’d have a look at my last night’s capture.
Secretively, I looked again all around the camp and up and down and opened the box. I got him right out in my hand with his wings folded properly and I was careful not to startle him. He lay limp in my grasp and I could feel his heart pound under the feathers but he only looked beyond me and up.
I saw him look that last look away beyond me into a sky so full of light that I could not follow his gaze. The little breeze flowed over me again, and nearby a mountain aspen shook all its tiny leaves. I suppose I must have had an idea then of what I was going to do, but I never let it come up into consciousness. I just reached over and laid the hawk on the grass.
He lay there a long minute without hope, unmoving, his eyes still fixed on that blue vault above him. It must have been that he was already so far away in heart that he never felt the release from my hand. He never even stood. He just lay with his breast against the grass.
In the next second after that long minute he was gone. Like a flicker of light, he had vanished with my eyes full on him but without actually seeing even a premonitory wing beat. He was gone straight into that towering emptiness of light and crystal that my eyes could scarcely bear to penetrate. For another long moment there was silence. I could not see him. The light was too intense. Then from far up somewhere a cry came ringing down.
I was young then and had seen little of the world, but when I heard that cry my heart turned over. It was not the cry of the hawk I had captured; for, by shifting my position against the sun, I was now seeing farther up. Straight out of the sun’s eye, where she must have been soaring restlessly above us for untold hours, hurtled his mate. And from far up, ringing from peak to peak of the summits over us, came a cry of such unutterable and ecstatic joy that it sounds down across the years and tingles among the cups on my quiet breakfast table.
I saw them both now. He was rising fast to meet her. They met in a great soaring gyre that turned to a whirling circle and a dance of wings. Once more, just once, their two voices, joined in a harsh wild medley of question and response, struck and echoed against the pinnacles of the valley. Then they were gone forever somewhere into those upper regions beyond the eyes of men.
In our next lives
Nguyen Khac-Hieu
In our next lives, we'll remember
not to be human.
We'll be a pair of wild geese,
flying high into the sky.
And from that distance,
we'll look down on
the world's blinding snows,
its oceans, waters, hills,
clouds and red dust,
as if we had never fallen.