Tuesday Poem: Raven Roosting

IV - Raven Roosting

Crow’s cousin
black in the blue alphabet
hung in the thorn hedge
by the neck - jet
claws still clutching
tail feathers a dark rainbow
in the spectrum of mourning
one eye open
the long beak parted -

‘I am everything I see and
I am this too.’

He has left his sky-skin
for the flies.


Kathleen Jones

Some readers will remember that I posted a week ago about finding a newly killed carrion crow hung in a hedge while out on a walk.  Somehow this co-incided with my thoughts about Ravens in mythology, which has been triggered by the reading of a remarkable book -  'A Story as Sharp as a Knife:  The Haida Mythtellers and Their World'.    It's all about the demise of oral story-telling and the traditions we've lost as a result.   Once, poets were the keepers of a tribe's history and identity.  They worked and re-worked the same fabric, but never in the same way, and embroidered and embellished it according to conventions that have also been lost.  Stories were handed down like heirlooms, as gifts, to be shaped and re-told by those who inherited them. (and isn't this what we did with the Tuesday Birthday Poem?)  I've always been fascinated by the way that old-english poets were known as 'schopes' - from the verb 'to shape'.  In some of the old european languages the verb for making a story was the same as that for a potter making a pot.
So I started writing a poem that was a re-shaping of a part of the Raven myth and then ended up writing more - I think probably it will become a series - a re-telling of an old myth with  (hopefully!) a modern twist.  I often think that these old mythologies remain relevant because they are telling fundamental truths about the human condition.
I'll be posting on the Haida Mythtellers later in the week.

For more poems please visit the Tuesday Poem website at http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Il tempo fa bello - ma ........

The weather is beautiful in Italy at the moment - the sun warm enough to have coffee on the terrace in only jumper and jeans. The nights are cold - down to 2 degrees, but it’s worth enduring them for the clear skies studded with stars. Mars is visible at the moment, large and very, very red. Mars, the planet of War and human aggression, of which there is plenty. No doubt, if I knew where to look, Saturn is out there too, spinning its rings of misery-dust.
It seems unfair to be in such idyllic surroundings when there is so much suffering in the world - and I’m thinking continually of Haiti, where people are still being miraculously plucked from the rubble. What I can’t bear to think about are those who survived the quake and then perished, buried alive, for want of rescue.
The numbers of dead and missing are staggering. Somehow it’s always the poor countries, the deprived areas, that suffer most. Those rich enough to be able to afford to get out of such places have gone long ago, so only the poor remain. They can’t afford good, well-built housing, earthquake proof, and they don’t have the political power to force their government to build it for them. And, as in the Chinese quake, they are vulnerable to corruption. We don’t live in a fair, well-balanced world, but one that sometimes makes me ashamed to be human.
Here in Italy there is a great deal of sympathy for the Haitians and the Italian mobile phone companies have set up a text-and-donate service, asking everyone for 2.50 euros - a small amount, but multiplied by a million or so .......
The earth we live on doesn’t conform to any health and safety regs, as the Italians know very well. All around us there are examples of the earth’s violent activity - Italy is literally being torn in half. In the mountains we found a ruined tower - no idea how old - medieval perhaps, though some ruins date back to the Romans or even to the Etruscans. But, though the walls are several feet thick, the tower was destroyed centuries ago by an earthquake that no one now remembers. People still live in this area, though the settlement around the tower has long since vanished. I sometimes think that we humans manage to live in disaster zones only because living memory goes back so few years, relative to the passage of geological time.
When I look at the tower I wonder what happened to the houses that once surrounded it, to the people who lived in them and what their stories were. So much of our past history survives only in myth and legend - come down to us as stories; Atlantis, Noah’s flood, the Iliad, the Norse sagas, the Welsh Mabinogion. And I wonder what will survive of us in story 2,000 years from now?