Vox Populi
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Thomas McGuire: Grief Observed
Blessed are they that mourn.
They shall be comforted.
—Another Gospel of Jesus
When they’d killed the magpies
And the hooligans had cooled
Their guns and slouched away
That cold, cruel Valentine’s Day,
I thought it was my lot to mourn
The dead, to tend the big-time
Wound left to rot in winter sun.
Alone I stood in that garden waste
When I had the thought I ought to dig
A grave to spare their bone-crates
From the coyotes and hungry hounds.
Then in a burst of brilliance, the sky
Brimmed with magpies, a flash of
Illumination—in black and white:
A host of magpie kith and kin come
Back to tend and keen the fallen.
Landing next the strewn corpses
They began a cawing ululation—
Pecking, prodding, preening the limp
And lifeless bodies dressed in red,
Iridescent blue, black and white.
Soon a few of that keening crew
Plucked and gleaned, off a nearby
Green, newly sprouted leaves of grass
Which they bore, then laid upon
The rent and blood-stained earth
Around their magpie brethren’s heads—
Were these not corvid wreaths of grief?
~~~~
Poem copyright 2024 Thomas McGuire. From Dark Devouring by Thomas McGuire (Ragged Sky, 2024). Included in Vox Populi by permission of Ellen Foos, Editor-in-chief, Ragged Sky Press.
Thomas McGuire is a poet, translator, essayist, and literary critic. He was raised in Northern California (yellow-billed magpie country). Now he makes his home in Colorado (black-billed magpie range). Dark Devouring is his first collection.
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Whoever came up with the arrogant idea that animals have no emotions?
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Anyone who has had a dog as a pet knows that animals have emotions.
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A formal tour de force! BRAVO from a fellow bird lover–one with a cat named Magpie.
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Communal grief by magpies? Seems quite possible. Corvids, according to Bernd Heinrich in Mind of the Raven are most notable for their curiosity. Could it be that curiosity and communal grief have some sort of connection? Perhaps both are necessary for crows, ravens, and magpies to survive? Jennifer Ackerman writes in her book The Genius of Birds, the story of a dead crow, soon surrounded by twelve other crows. “After a minute or two, one crow flew off for a few seconds, then returned with a small twig or piece of dried grass. It dropped the twig on the body, then flew away.” She goes on to write that one by one each crow flew off, came back and dropped a piece of grass or twig onto the body, then flew away. Some have argued that the response may be more social than emotional. They speculate that the response may be the group trying to figure out the implications of the death for their own survival. I’d guess grief and self-preservation go together.
My cousin Bruce had a pet crow, and raised it from the nest on. He rode a school bus home from school each day, the bus stopped three blocks away. My aunt let Joe the Crow out of his cage, and when he heard the squeal of the bus brakes he would fly the three blocks and land on Bruce’s shoulder. The bus would wait until this happened, and then the kids would cheer. So covids are amazing.
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I love your posts here, Jim. Thank you.
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I ordered Dark Devouring the minute I finished reading this poignant, beautiful elegy — such exquisite language, such extraordinary imagery & craft. Thank you, Michael, for introducing me to this poet!
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I will follow
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I had the same response to McGuire’s poems. I’ve read Dark Devouring, nature poems written by a naturalist, not a romantic. Quite powerful.
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Love this so much! I had never heard magpies do this, and the poem’s language and sound effects are just stunning!
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Aren’t they just so.
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”a cawing ululation” !
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just so
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Astounding to hear of this bird ceremony taking place! To drag a dead cow to her final resting place through a herd (thing I try to avoid doing if I can) elicits any number of imaginable responses, from disgust, through curiosity, to a kind of ceremonial attendance. The birds seem certain of their plans and maybe this was taken as a massacre and deserved their communal ritual. I think its a wonderful poem!
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The way that various species communities respond to death is fascinating.
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Oh, this is so painfully exquisite. It reminds me so much of Gaza.
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Me too, Mandy. How cruel our species is.
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