“Little Blackbird,” by Randy Aquilizan
It’s World Poetry Day! Like so many holidays — the ones dedicated to Love, for instance, and Generosity, and Peace on Earth, and People Who Are Different – this one commemorates a quality that most of us expel from our lives rigorously the other 364 days of the year. In this light I am moved to think of R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), a poet I have been fond of ever since discovering a volume of his in an office in Budapest some twenty years ago. A religious and mystical and yet intransigently worldly writer, he is the least musical and, in that sense, the least poetic of poets. What he writes makes no effort to seduce you; it shows you its raw bones like a gnawed fish, it forces you into considering what actually makes something poetry, and whether you like his work or not will depend on whether you can think that through and what quality of thought you bring to the enterprise. In being unmusical he is also very un-Welsh, Wales being his native country and the object of his intermittent patriotism. I have a lot of Welsh blood — my great-grandfather was named Harper, a profession as Welsh as one could wish — so I claim the right to quote Evelyn Waugh’s immortal diatribe on the Welsh nation and its accomplishments (from Decline and Fall):
“The Welsh character is an interesting study,” said Dr. Fagan. “I have often considered writing a little monograph on the subject, but I was afraid it might make me unpopular in the village. The ignorant speak of them as Celts, which is of course wholly erroneous. They are of pure Iberian stock– the aboriginal inhabitants of Europe who survive only in Portugal and the Basque district. Celts readily intermarry with their neighbours and absorb them. From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters rarely mate with human-kind except their own blood relations. …
“I often think,” he continued, “that we can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales. Think of Edward of Carnarvon, the first Prince of Wales, a perverse life and an unseemly death, then the Tudors and the dissolution of the Church, then Lloyd George, the temperance movement, Nonconformity and lust stalking hand in hand through the country, wasting and ravaging. But perhaps you think I exaggerate? I have a certain rhetorical tendency, I admit.”
“No, no,” said Paul.
“The Welsh,” said the Doctor, “are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing,” he said with disgust, “sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver….”
Except for the bit about not mating with humankind (he did have a wife, but one senses he regarded the species’ reproduction as one of God’s more lasting errors) that is not R. S. Thomas.
Here are two marvelous poems about blackbirds. The second, it will be noted, makes mincemeat of the easy lyricism of Wallace Stevens.
A Blackbird Singing
It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes’
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.You have heard it often, alone at your desk
In a green April, your mind drawn
Away from its work by sweet disturbance
Of the mild evening outside your room.A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history’s overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.“Blackbirds flying,” by Kathleen Westkaemper
Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man
1
It is calm.
It is as though
we lived in a garden
that had not yet arrived
at the knowledge of
good and evil.
But there is a man in it.2
There will be
rain falling vertically
from an indifferent
sky. There will stare out
from behind its
bars the face of the man
who is not enjoying it.3
Nothing higher
than a blackberry
bush. As the sun comes up
fresh, what is the darkness
stretching from horizon
to horizon? It is the shadow
here of the forked man.4
We have eaten
the blackberries and spat out
the seeds, but they lie
glittering like the eyes of a man.5
After we have stopped
singing, the garden is disturbed
by echoes; it is
the man whistling, expecting
everything to come to him.6
We wipe our beaks
on the branches
wasting the dawn’s
jewellery to get rid
of the taste of a man.7
Neverthless,
which is not the case
with a man, our
bills give us no trouble.8
Who said the
number was unlucky?
It was a man, who,
trying to pass us,
had his licence endorsed
thirteen times.9
In the cool
of the day the garden
seems given over
to blackbirds. Yet
we know also that somewhere
there is a man in hiding.10
To us there are
eggs and there are
blackbirds. But there is the man,
too, trying without feathers
to incubate a solution.11
We spread our
wings, reticulating
our air-space. A man stands
under us and worries
at his ability to do the same.12
When night comes
like a visitor
from outer space
we stop our ears
lest we should hear tell
of the man in the moon.13
Summer is
at an end. The migrants
depart. When they return
in spring to the garden,
will there be a man among them?
