As they ascend bare-bones and are more historical than our infant species, birds live their lives oblivious to ours. They do not give us signs, but we perform omens for them and cast spells from them. They provide our best metaphors and the neural infrastructure of our dreams. They challenge our assumptions about the deep measure of intelligence.
Because birds deceive us so much, they attract our attention, and whatever we polish with attention becomes a mirror. In all thinking, calculation; in all calculations, something that can happen – to see us better than we are.
That's what got the Nobel prize Derek Walcott (January 23, 1930–March 17, 2017) includes in his shamanic poem “The Age of Wonderful Peace”—an eternal vision of freedom from the worst of us, written in the last years of the Cold War, a war that could have ended the world but was terminated, not because we are perfect, but because we have an imperfect unity, because Maya is eternal. mirror of the poem, we can happen.
A TIME OF PHANTASMAL SILENCE
by Derek WalcottThen all the tribes of birds arose together
the great net of shadows of this world
in many dialects, twitter languages,
sewing and skipping. Lift them up
the shadow of tall pines down the trackless slopes,
the shadows of the glass-faced towers down the evening streets,
the shade of a weak plant in the city –
the net goes up noiseless like the night, the birds chirping noiseless, until
there was no more evening, time, decay or weather,
only this passing of phantasmal light
so that it is not a small shadow that has dared to be separated.And the men did not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys follow behind them with silver strings
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they don't hear
star wars crying out in silence,
carrying a net on top, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a painting of a mother
quivering gauze over trembling eyes
of a child who is tossed to sleep;
it was light
which you will see in the evening on the side of the mountain
in yellow October, and no one who heard knew it
what change brought about in the coming of the raven,
the killer's scream, the ember-circling chough
such a great, silent, and sublime concern
in fields and houses where birds live;
except that it was their passing of the season, Love,
made unseasonable, or, by the high right of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless
below them there were black holes in the windows and houses;
up they raised the net with a soundless voice
above all change, betrayal of the falling sun,
and this season took one second, like a pause
between evening and darkness, between wrath and peace,
but, as our world is now, he stayed for a long time.
“The Age of Wonderful Silence” is from Walcott's most important Collected Poems: 1948-1984 (public library), who also gave us his “Love After Love” — one of the greatest poems ever written.
For a more harmonious view of the family, illustrated in what is possible for us, enjoy Marie Howe's poem “Hymn.”
