An early morning broadcast by Michael Symmons Roberts in June 2017 alerted me to the fact that apparently a magpie with a distinctive mark would recognise itself in a mirror and try to scratch the mark off.
Notes: stanza 28 – the Parousia is the Presence of Christ in the Advent and/or the Second Coming; stanza 36 – the Eagle nebula is in the process of creating many new stars; stanza 37 – when I wrote this poem in autumn 2018 the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the Donbass region, which includes Donetsk, appeared to have died down; now in 2022 it is back with a vengeance; Fowey is pronounced by all good Cornish folk as Foy, a single syllable.
-----------------------
How wonderful is what’s real! A magpie stickered
With a coloured spot when shown itself full frontal
In a glass will take alarm
And scratch that talisman or charm;
It’s proof that that hot bundle – feathers, hunger, beak –
Intent on daily getting and soliptical
To a fault, can recognise
Itself – that bulk, those purposed eyes;
Indeed, can birth a concept in its head’s humid
Warmth, not eatable, not tuppable, therefore for
Most creatures irrelevant
Be they slinking or corybant.
Hence, the paupered blue tit, preening on a window’s
Ledge, attacks itself if the sun’s move discovers
A changeling in the cold glass,
Clueless at sight of its own arse.
And yet, alack, self-knowing’s no cognomen for
What’s pacific in that push and pull, called Nature,
Where “me first” and “safety first”
Govern all, from breeding to thirst.
Consider the crow, which also knows itself when
Challenged: crafty as Ulysses it bundles stones
Into an ostrich-neck flute,
Raising the water in that shute
Till it grabs the floating bon (some unstomached sop
To us); but if on hunger-hunt, its gleam eye pins
A starling’s nest beneath eaves,
Or a fledgling grounded in leaves,
Intelligence turns proxy to the fraught killer,
Sizing thrust and angle to seize the unguard eggs,
Trapping the fledgling en-rood,
Flesh-stripping it, living, in blood.
No, nous and slaughter, double-sinewed, prowl the streets
And dales: think of old Tawny, granddad-shaggy, wise,
Dozing on his ash tree perch
Yet scalpel-final in the search
For rats and rabbits who frenzy in his claws’ clutch.
And if owls, what of men? – the sapient, ramrod-tall,
Knowing in knowing, but odd,
China-shop bulls, part satyr, part god.
Yes, knowing that the stuck carcass, butchered, creates
Belly-rich stew, more toothsome than some dusty nuts
Or beans tilled in a tribe’s slick
Of cleared ground, husbanded by stick.
That steamy broth of protein, loosed by fire and stir,
The gristle further mashed by the tribe’s tough molars,
Force feeds the gluttonous brain,
And soon Abel is killed by Cain.
China-shop bulls, part satyr, part god.
Yes, knowing that the stuck carcass, butchered, creates
Belly-rich stew, more toothsome than some dusty nuts
Or beans tilled in a tribe’s slick
Of cleared ground, husbanded by stick.
That steamy broth of protein, loosed by fire and stir,
The gristle further mashed by the tribe’s tough molars,
Force feeds the gluttonous brain,
And soon Abel is killed by Cain.
That brain-on-legs bestruts the world’s plains and cleaves seas
Like some Iliad hero seeking gloire and plunder;
Intelligence, grown self-aware,
Farms life and death and will not share.
Settled, his burghs then swell to obesity,
Fatting on meat which stockmen must ceaselessly kill;
Men by men also are slain,
Primordial passions lunge again:
Perhaps the snitch, dagging home in dark alleys his
Oily blade, or the jilted caressing the throat
He once grazed on, night and night,
Now twisting her scarf tighter, tight;
And, always, wars and rumours of wars, bestial tides
Which slaughter in ravin, flinging up ground, thrusting
Down cities till all are crazed –
Like storm waves leaving Chaos dazed.
