A collaborative praise song for “indifference banished by love.”
In one of the essays collected in Vesper Flights (public library) — which was among the finest books of 2020 and includes one of the most magnificent things ever written about the enchantment of the total solar eclipse — Helen Macdonald reflects on watching starlings swarm the sky like living constellations on their way to roost for the night, and writes:
We call them murmurations, but the Danish term, sort sol, is better: black sun. It captures their almost celestial strangeness. Standing on the Suffolk coast a few years ago, I saw a far-flung mist of starlings turn in a split second into an ominous sphere like a dark planet hanging over the marshes. Everyone around me gasped audibly before it exploded in a maelstrom of wings.
In a lovely echo of Richard Feynman’s Ode to a Flower — his timeless, poetic insistence that knowing the science behind something beautiful doesn’t rob it of enchantment but “only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe” — Macdonald unfurls the science behind the awe of murmurations:
The changing shape of starling flocks comes from each bird copying the motions of the six or seven others around it with extreme rapidity; their reaction time is less than a tenth of a second. Turns can propagate through a cloud of birds at speeds approaching ninety miles per hour, making murmurations look from a distance like a single pulsing, living organism.
Like all great essays, Macdonald’s begins with an observation of one thing and becomes a meditation on another, taking one fragment of elemental reality and polishing it to shine a sidewise gleam on a larger existential reality — in this case, the murmuration of human refugees trying to find their way to safety and belonging amid a gasping world.
Poet Linda France encountered Macdonald’s essay during a climate writing residency at New Writing North. Inspired by Neil Gaiman’s “What You Need to Be Warm” — his humanistic poem for refugees and the homeless, composed from thousands of definitions of warmth from around the world — she set out to compose a lyric murmuration, turning hundreds of crowdsourced verses into a single stunning poem, which artist Kate Sweeney then turned into a lyrical animated short film. Amplifying the poignancy of the project is its timing — it was created for the 2020 Durham Book Festival, while the human world was roosting in confused and frightened isolation, swarmed by a shared terror, suddenly more aware than ever that we are a single pulsing living dying organism.
MURMURATION
by Linda France1
*
Because we love watching the flock’s precision glide
upstroke for height, tilt of wing spun mid-flight
just for a moment
we’re in the frenzied swirling rushhome for the winged
owls hoot their love through the dark
chiffchaff creeps up stalks
fennel and flow
dipper and wagtail
Arctic terns like darts
geese honking each note weighed
a duck sits on top of the bowling club out king of the worldif you love the bird, don’t cage it
we’ll miss the starlings when April comes
*
on any high hilltop, breathing this air,
this precious air, remember those who lost their breathif you love the flower, don’t pick it
a sudden sweep of daisies in a green field
like counting stars
losing count
starting over againmore shades of green
than words scream Life!life, damp grass between bare toes
light passing through poppy petals
the slow unfolding of a rosehome for the prickly, those that slither
climb or crawl
for us allatom by atom
cell by cell
what else matterswe cherish these conversations when the vetchling speaks
the lavish eruption of nasturtiums, weaving ropes of white stems
orange flowers
lush leaves
hearts burnt openif you love wild things, let them be
*
follow the almost invisible path through the heather
summer’s easy grin, the slow smile of autumn
gaze of winter starlightisn’t this how we learn not to fear
change
the seasons
that mark time
shape our livesspangles of sunlight on a river
otters ripplingthe sting of cold sea on tight, red skin
we feel it all, drink it in and love it
love honey, love bees
the smell of dust, hot rain
a damson tree
dripping purple fruitslove the kiss of a dandelion clock
wind-suck and time disappears
the pull of the moon
waves that crash with forgotten history
the rubbed edges of the world
a spider crab scurrying sidewayswe love the roaring isles
the taste of a peachour neighbours busy in their vegetable patch
the daylit gatetunnel of trees
those little paths one-person-wide
between hazel and ash
warm barkin the city that birthed us
bright tufts that grow in the cracks*
because we love the way dawn wakes up
and switches night to daythe twist and fall
the surging sweeping joy of it all
the visceral thrillhow dusk strips away the waste of worried days
as birds yield to their roost
and leave the night to moth and bat
beyond day, beyond everythingwe know we too are rock and star
but now on the tip of our tongue
even love’s not enough
2
*
At the midnight of the year
utter darkness
a million compasses fail
and the starlings don’t come
empty sky
no swallows, no swifts
no summer nests in the eaves
threads looped in the blue
a blackbird that isn’t there
opens his throat
into silence, thin air
no golden noteyou wake to a dawn
unheralded
dusk, uninvited, doesn’t know
where to begin
ghost calls echo in the trees
dogs and deer stop barking
rain forgets to fall
its rhythm broken, lost
oak and elm hold their breath
you will never see another flower
the stars’ last vanishing act
no words left3
*
April high tide
hurls driftwood
oarweed
sea-glass
a wreckage of shellstomorrow comes soon
how much would you pay to hear the sound
of rain
or birdsongwhat if couldn’t-care-less cared more
and we let the murmur of change
change our wayshear the roots of trees
whispering
dark soil’s cavernous memories
tectonic plates shiftsit like a mountain
all weathers
in our heartswhat if our flutterings become feathers
the starlings lend us their wingstill we trust enough
to fly together
synchronised one vast voice
all different, all the same
to mend our wounded earthballads of continents crossed
comrades lost to storm or predator
the shockwave moving through the flocksee how we flit
twist swell
dive
co-mingle co-exist co-inherebelong together
*
imagine we’re made of those slivers of sky
know all the colours of lighthitch a ride on the bees’ flight
go to earth with badgers
small as Alice catch the worm
the keys of the ash
rise like a dandelion
the promise of a peony budwhere heather meets heaven
homethis is the patience of the albatross
a cormorant’s hunger
craning for a flash of silver
beneath the waterthe good omen of a crescent moon
milky stars
set in new stories
meadow orchids
skeins of geesea chance to constellate honesty
justice
escape heroic fantasies
gravity’s bootsso what if’s rubbed out
and becomes what isthe path between
then we can hear the hiss of rain
*
what is
is more than the ear can hear
or eye see —we will never have this time again
can never rewind this momentall the maybes, all the small things
we touch
gentle, curious
and let passlike fruit in season
the secret language of earth
underland of coal, uranium, oilindifference banished by love
power to the parliament of rooks
it’s just this us
the people
our footsteps
walking into all this wonder
every day through every weathersolidarity
the planet’s ragemaking a stand
for a different futureit’s just this
our words
building this home we share
these bridgesnowhere else to go
here we are
turning over
this tainted pageto start again
and healing the earth
the earth heals usour better place
not a destination
a methodcommon ground
*
ask
what if words could fly
and this poem rose into the blueness
a whirr of black italic wingsbreath by breath
a prayer
to give life back to life
all of us
pieces of the worldwhat if all the time we were searching
the sky
the birds
were watching for uswhat, if not cartwheeling
what, if not care
what, if not a cadence
like love
held lightly
Complement with a stunning animated adaptation of Marie Howe’s “Singularity” — a kindred-spirited poem about our creaturely and cosmic interconnectedness — and a young poet’s staggering response to it, then revisit Hannah Arendt on identity and the meaning of refugee and Toni Morrison on borders, belonging, and the meaning of home.
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