A Murder of Crows

June 11 2019

The dead bird

gleaming with the wet-black sheen of crows

must have been slow taking flight.

Perhaps a gust of wind, a shift

a misjudgment of lift,

and he was clipped by some roaring tractor

dopplering past.

And now he lay mangled,

an awkwardly angled wing

body crushed flat.

I have seen squirrel, porcupine, skunk,

dead bodies

like discarded objects

stinking in the summer sun,

dark blood

drying on the pavement.

But crows do not die alone,

and two companions

were hopping about the corpse,

inspecting

nudging

hovering in low loose spirals

as I drove by,

uncharacteristically quiet

for such raucous birds.

I have heard that orca mourn for days

and elephants have rituals of death.

And in their agitation

perplexity

or even reverence

I do not doubt that crows, too

seem to grasp mortality.

A body so still

must seem unnatural,

but they see it for what it was.

I wonder if they also see themselves

and their own inevitable end.

Or, like us, do they other the dead

and think they will somehow be spared

such grim finality?

Too quick

too clever

too virtuous?

Too vitally alive

to imagine nothingness?

I don't think I'm morbid, or at least not in an unhealthy way. And I don't think that poets are preoccupied with death and dark introspection, as the stereotype of the tortured artist would suggest. On the other hand, I think I would write a lot more poems about death if it didn't seem so self-indulgent. And isn't any creative act a kind of passive resistance to death, a grasping for posterity?

The thing is, contemplating death gives us an appreciation of how precious and short life is. We might lead simpler more innocent lives without the knowledge we will die, but that knowledge also enriches us with ambition and appreciation and urgency. And humility, as well, because it diminishes our self-importance and solipsism. It forces us to see ourselves as part of nature, with its necessary tenets of succession, regeneration, and the greater good.

Because evolution requires us to die: to make room and free resources for the next generation; to enable the mixing of DNA and the errors of replication that are evolution's engine. Without death, we would still be rudimentary single-celled organisms, millions of years old, floating in the warm slime of brackish oceans.

To comment more specifically on the contents of the poem, I will remind the reader of that recent story about the orca mother who carried the body of her dead baby for weeks, almost starving to death in the process. And in terms of stylistic choices, and despite my naturally conservative aversion to neologism in language, I quite like the “verbing” of other, as well as of doppler. (And, indeed, the “verbing” of verb!)

When I sent this to my first readers, I wrote them this. I think it's worth including here.

Wow! When they come to me, they really come. This is another of those that seemed to write itself:  like taking dictation, or as if my hand had a mind of its own. I started to consider the first few lines of a possible poem as soon as I saw the dead bird. But then quickly moved on to other things, and didn't really revisit the idea until a few days later when I sat down in the mood to write and tried to come up with something. So this is pretty much the first rough draft. Very little has been tweaked. Preciously, poems that have come so easily usually end up being keepers. I have high hopes for this one.