Culver

It's really long so apologies for that. Anyway, inspired by me eating a croissant on a bench. Culver is just an old name for a pigeon. There are historical references to pigeons and the sense of them both an ill omen and associated with goddesses too. 

 

I am a tormented soul or

a tormenter of souls,

I do not recall which now.

 

She eats, perched upon a wooden throne and

I observe how she tears the golden flesh,

I watch every flake break mistake,

there is a fire, a fire within me –

I saw a man with a stick of it

that he shook, quick flick flick and

so it was extinguished.

 

She is tired and we are all tired

of something, we roost and eat and

wander the wide way of day men

and then the people beneath the stars

who are also phantoms of sorts.

One, I heard proclaim, the grey stones

were the canvases of vomit and shit

and dogends of England’s art.

 

She is unhappy and we are all unhappy

with something; my own ancestors haunt me

with their manifold woes, ghostwinged,

the shadowy vestiges of a once glorious history.

I might have slept upon Anacreon’s lyre

or my own cliff above the music of the ocean.

I might have carried love letters or

a note to Brutus under siege. Indeed,

my father’s mother’s father’s mother’s father’s

mother flew, herself, through the metal and blaze of war.

 

She is suffering and we are all suffering

from something; I am a warning misread

and thus, unheeded. Just as the hawk,

I can hardly bear to speak its name, the hawk

stalk squawk dreadgawk that spilled the blood of a culver

upon the bust of a king that foretold

the loss of his head from his body.

There is the kick of the child,

the shrill laughter of a parent,

we note the symbols, we dream,

the metaphysics of my brethren --

that we might recognise one from the other,

that there is the tenderness of devotion,

that we know where home is.

 

We know where home was

or could be or might have been;

these are the ‘slings and arrows’,

you might say, there was the warmth

of a flame, then the cruelty of a pyre

until the death of fire to ash,

when hope is now no more than smoke,

and I might pray:

May the sun bless your wings,

May the sun make his face shine

upon your feathers, and cleanse you,

May the moon lift up her countenance

upon you, and give you peace,

a branch of oak, a mother,

the comfort of love, of another,

but there are crumbs only,

and so I accept them.

 
Recording of me reading it: https://on.soundcloud.com/yH45emPGNmKzmv7aA

Painting is from here"Zureando en el parque" - Category:Paintings of pigeons - Wikimedia Commons