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 noteWith an eye to the “interrogation of our relationship with the planet and other species” radiating from the submissions and to how they deepened her own understanding of “the dangers of ‘us’-and-‘them’-ing,” France adds:*
because we love the way dawn wakes up
and switches night to daya sudden sweep of daisies in a green field
like counting stars
losing count
starting over again
1
*
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 rush
then we can hear the hiss of rain
common ground
what if couldn’t-care-less cared more
and we let the murmur of change
change our ways
if you love the bird, don’t cage it
even love’s not enough
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 invited people to submit verses about our relationship to the natural world beginning with “Because I love…” and “What if…,” then set out to stitch the five hundred submission with the thread of her own poetic imagination into a lyric murmuration, which artist Kate Sweeney turned into a soulful 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 the shared terror of a pandemic and the smoke of unprecedented wildfires, suddenly more aware than ever that we are a single pulsing living dying organism.
*
on any high hilltop, breathing this air,
this precious air, remember those who lost their breath
and healing the earth
the earth heals us
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 world
we know we too are rock and star
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.
hear the roots of trees
whispering
dark soil’s cavernous memories
tectonic plates shift
this is the patience of the albatross
a cormorant’s hunger
craning for a flash of silver
beneath the water
isn’t this how we learn not to fear
change
the seasons
that mark time
shape our lives
love the kiss of a dandelion clock
hitch 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 bud
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:
nowhere else to go
home for the winged
it’s just this
our words
building this home we share
these bridges
you 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 left
like fruit in season
the secret language of earth
underland of coal, uranium, oil
belong together
it’s just this us
the people
our footsteps
walking into all this wonder
every day through every weather
MURMURATION
by Linda France
till we trust enough
to fly together
synchronised one vast voice
all different, all the same
to mend our wounded earth
breath by breath
a prayer
to give life back to life
all of us
pieces of the world
atom by atom
cell by cell
what else matters
our better place
not a destination
a method
the sting of cold sea on tight, red skin
making a stand
for a different future
*
imagine we’re made of those slivers of sky
know all the colours of light
ballads of continents crossed
comrades lost to storm or predator
the shockwave moving through the flock
the good omen of a crescent moon
milky stars
set in new stories
meadow orchids
skeins of geese
*
follow the almost invisible path through the heather
summer’s easy grin, the slow smile of autumn
gaze of winter starlight
spangles of sunlight on a river
otters rippling
in the city that birthed us
bright tufts that grow in the cracks
tomorrow comes soon
a chance to constellate honesty
justice
escape heroic fantasies
gravity’s boots
the pull of the moon
waves that crash with forgotten history
the rubbed edges of the world
a spider crab scurrying sideways
we will never have this time again
can never rewind this moment
the path between
so what if’s rubbed out
and becomes what is
but now on the tip of our tongue
*
what is
is more than the ear can hear
or eye see —
home for the prickly, those that slither
climb or crawl
for us all
see how we flit
twist swell
dive
co-mingle co-exist co-inhere
what, if not cartwheeling
what, if not care
what, if not a cadence
like love
held lightly
the twist and fall
the surging sweeping joy of it all
the visceral thrill
tunnel of trees
those little paths one-person-wide
between hazel and ash
warm bark
solidarity
the planet’s rage
where heather meets heaven
home
if you love the flower, don’t pick it
here we are
turning over
this tainted page
sit like a mountain
all weathers
in our hearts
*
ask
what if words could fly
and this poem rose into the blueness
a whirr of black italic wings
how 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 everything
life, damp grass between bare toes
light passing through poppy petals
the slow unfolding of a rose
our neighbours busy in their vegetable patch
the daylit gate
indifference banished by love
we feel it all, drink it in and love it
all the maybes, all the small things
we touch
gentle, curious
and let pass
wind-suck and time disappears
we cherish these conversations when the vetchling speaks
the lavish eruption of nasturtiums, weaving ropes of white stems
orange flowers
lush leaves
hearts burnt open
to start again
what if our flutterings become feathers
the starlings lend us their wings
we’ll miss the starlings when April comes
what if all the time we were searching
the sky
the birds
were watching for us
love honey, love bees
the smell of dust, hot rain
a damson tree
dripping purple fruits
if you love wild things, let them be
3
*
April high tide
hurls driftwood
oarweed
sea-glass
a wreckage of shells
we love the roaring isles
the taste of a peach
more shades of green
than words scream Life!
power to the parliament of rooks
how much would you pay to hear the sound
of rain
or birdsong
*
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 rush
then we can hear the hiss of rain
common ground
what if couldn’t-care-less cared more
and we let the murmur of change
change our ways
if you love the bird, don’t cage it
even love’s not enough
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 invited people to submit verses about our relationship to the natural world beginning with “Because I love…” and “What if…,” then set out to stitch the five hundred submission with the thread of her own poetic imagination into a lyric murmuration, which artist Kate Sweeney turned into a soulful 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 the shared terror of a pandemic and the smoke of unprecedented wildfires, suddenly more aware than ever that we are a single pulsing living dying organism.
*
on any high hilltop, breathing this air,
this precious air, remember those who lost their breath
and healing the earth
the earth heals us
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 world
we know we too are rock and star
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.
hear the roots of trees
whispering
dark soil’s cavernous memories
tectonic plates shift
this is the patience of the albatross
a cormorant’s hunger
craning for a flash of silver
beneath the water
isn’t this how we learn not to fear
change
the seasons
that mark time
shape our lives
love the kiss of a dandelion clock
hitch 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 bud
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:
nowhere else to go
home for the winged
it’s just this
our words
building this home we share
these bridges
you 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 left
like fruit in season
the secret language of earth
underland of coal, uranium, oil
belong together
it’s just this us
the people
our footsteps
walking into all this wonder
every day through every weather
MURMURATION
by Linda France
till we trust enough
to fly together
synchronised one vast voice
all different, all the same
to mend our wounded earth
breath by breath
a prayer
to give life back to life
all of us
pieces of the world
atom by atom
cell by cell
what else matters
our better place
not a destination
a method
the sting of cold sea on tight, red skin
making a stand
for a different future
*
imagine we’re made of those slivers of sky
know all the colours of light
ballads of continents crossed
comrades lost to storm or predator
the shockwave moving through the flock
the good omen of a crescent moon
milky stars
set in new stories
meadow orchids
skeins of geese
*
follow the almost invisible path through the heather
summer’s easy grin, the slow smile of autumn
gaze of winter starlight
spangles of sunlight on a river
otters rippling
in the city that birthed us
bright tufts that grow in the cracks
tomorrow comes soon
a chance to constellate honesty
justice
escape heroic fantasies
gravity’s boots
the pull of the moon
waves that crash with forgotten history
the rubbed edges of the world
a spider crab scurrying sideways
we will never have this time again
can never rewind this moment
the path between
so what if’s rubbed out
and becomes what is
but now on the tip of our tongue
*
what is
is more than the ear can hear
or eye see —
home for the prickly, those that slither
climb or crawl
for us all
see how we flit
twist swell
dive
co-mingle co-exist co-inhere
what, if not cartwheeling
what, if not care
what, if not a cadence
like love
held lightly
the twist and fall
the surging sweeping joy of it all
the visceral thrill
tunnel of trees
those little paths one-person-wide
between hazel and ash
warm bark
solidarity
the planet’s rage
where heather meets heaven
home
if you love the flower, don’t pick it
here we are
turning over
this tainted page
sit like a mountain
all weathers
in our hearts
*
ask
what if words could fly
and this poem rose into the blueness
a whirr of black italic wings
how 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 everything
life, damp grass between bare toes
light passing through poppy petals
the slow unfolding of a rose
our neighbours busy in their vegetable patch
the daylit gate
indifference banished by love
we feel it all, drink it in and love it
all the maybes, all the small things
we touch
gentle, curious
and let pass
wind-suck and time disappears
we cherish these conversations when the vetchling speaks
the lavish eruption of nasturtiums, weaving ropes of white stems
orange flowers
lush leaves
hearts burnt open
to start again
what if our flutterings become feathers
the starlings lend us their wings
we’ll miss the starlings when April comes
what if all the time we were searching
the sky
the birds
were watching for us
love honey, love bees
the smell of dust, hot rain
a damson tree
dripping purple fruits
if you love wild things, let them be
3
*
April high tide
hurls driftwood
oarweed
sea-glass
a wreckage of shells
we love the roaring isles
the taste of a peach
more shades of green
than words scream Life!
power to the parliament of rooks
how much would you pay to hear the sound
of rain
or birdsong
