Tornado Crows

On the morning after the tornadoes, I woke to the caws and squawks of 30 crows who were perched in various places in my living room. Some stared down from the mantel. Others circled on the blades of the spinning fan. One stared through the bookshelf glass, stared through to my Poe collection, which, by happenstance, was sitting upright against The Holy Bible.

I watched them there until they noticed me, until they left their perches circling, until they converged into a singular swirling black cloud and dissolved at once into the bandwidth of my computer. There they were, behind the screen, sixty beady eyes blinkering, blinkering, blinkering as they called to me. Between the cacophony of caws they pecked at one another’s unpreened feathers. (Oh how hard it is to preen when your blinkering eyes and squawking beak want only to pick apart your neighbor!)

I watched these crows pecking and such, heard the crows–or rather the translation of the crows, which was made possible through some Google application. It was a mechanical rendering, one which transmitted all the deciphered squawks at once, delivered them in a monotonous robotic echoing that came as if being spoken through a cold tin can which has had both top and bottom removed. One crow said God is such and such, and so and so–if he really was at all, that is. Another said with such certainty that God simply Is–He the very definition of goodness, and calling us to careful preening by way of his eternal and frightful thundering. Three crows squawked this second notion down for some other reason, which was undecipherable on account of the fact that it was all said at once. Google has its limitations, see, and it translated this three-bird call into nonsensical words like “flitteration,” and “Timwittery.”

These are the things I saw on the morning after the tornadoes.

I have heard, though, that caws and pecking do not comprise the whole of birddom. There are barn swallows who occupy themselves first with the creation of safe places, with piling mud pellets up, one atop the next. Their act of creativity always starts at the same place–the dust from whence they came–and they turn that dust into something substantial and inhabitable. I’ve heard that these barn swallows incorporate beauty into their homes, that they add a flourish every now and then. But not the flourishes of all-too-heavy golden rings, mind you. Instead, they use discarded foil wrappers–simpler, overlooked things. I’ve heard that these barn swallows build the steady foundation first, then the walls, then they lay their eggs and wait. And while they wait, they do not groan. Instead, they sing beautiful benedictions.

(Original image by y Danny Chapman, Creative Commons, via Flickr.)

The Opalescent Swallow

As you have no doubt figured by now, I hold down a steady gig with the good folks at Tweetspeak Poetry. I don’t always cross-post to my stuff there, but I was particularly fond of today’s piece and thought I’d share it. (By the way, thanks for bearing with me during this moving phase. The Haines house is neck deep in foam peanuts.)

In Randy Laney’s field, the grasshoppers and katydids rubbed leg against forewing, and wing against wing; their songs were the rising crescendos and falling diminuendos of one thousand cabinet doors creaking opened and closed, and opened and closed again–all in rhythm, ad infinitum. In the center of the field, from the knee-high grass, rose three poles, which climbed some twenty feet to their terminus where the Purple Martin tenements balanced. The homes were white-washed over winter because, as Randy Laney said, the miniature siding was beginning to splotch green with age and the Purple Martin is a well-to-do bird, a passerine with no fancy for the unkempt.

The male Martin perched on a white-sheathed wire connecting his condominium to the next, the opalescent swallow gleaming as if freshly oiled, as if being greased to slide through the remarkably undersized front door of his summer home. He clung to the line, chippering and cheeping toward us. It was a welcome, not a warning.

Continue reading at Tweetspeak.  Photo by  Jenny Downing, Creative Commons via Flickr.

Kabede, This is Going to Get Heavy

Photo by MEDIODESCOCIDO, Creative Commons.

Our driver’s name was not Kabede, but for the sake of giving you the sense of things, it will be his given name in the following. The English translation of Kabede is “getting heavy,” so it seems appropriate, and I must admit, when I discuss my time in Ethiopia, it tends to come across this way.

As a caveat, I mostly prefer to confine my discussions of Ethiopia to the internet real estate of others. I do this for two distinct reasons. First, I enjoy stirring the pot, although this enjoyment is typically confined to the pots sitting on my neighbors’ stoves. Secondly, writing in another forum allows me some notion (perhaps a feigned one) of plausible deniability…

*****

Follow me to my friend Lore’s place for the rest of this story. I hope you’re ready. This is going to get heavy.

The New Nostalgia (on Packing the Moving Boxes)

Just a bit of a heads up: things might get quieter around here for a while.

It looks like Amber and I will be boxing things up for a move across town. Though it’s still pending a final inspection, we sold the Rock House, an Ozark stone beaut that has been in our family since before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We’ll say goodbye to the white rent house, the dilapidated chicken house, and the English ivy and honeysuckle that turns me to cussing every spring. We’ll say so-long to the mailbox by the road, the one I replace at least once a year on account of its being the target parking spot for all the cross-eyed drunks in Washington County. We’ll say goodbye to the Methodist Church across the street, the church where Bill, the man who taught me to fly fish, worships.

If I’m honest, it feels a bit like hacking off a limb. I’m sure there’ll be a phantom pain or two down the road, but for now, I’m trying to repeat this mantra, “we will create a new nostalgia.” Somehow, that seems to be doing the trick. It’s verbal Valium.

So, like I said, it may get quieter around here through the end of May. In the meantime, I wish you’d consider some of my friends.

I’ve been watching good people build altars with words lately. In a world where cynicism toward the church seems to be the mode of the day, a friend of mine is breaking free. Read Nish’s “A Personal Revival,” then ask yourself, “am I mired in anger; do I hate the church?”

I wrote the piece “Biters” for Deeper Church last week, and I won’t spend time unpacking the allegory (but come on… it’s not that complex). In any event, the piece spurred my friend Kiki to explore the history and tradition of zombie lore. He’s well educated in this stuff, and his writing is always fun to read. Zombies may not be your thing, but check it out anyway.

“Sometimes, I’m just so tired of All the Reacting. Every one is always reacting to every one else’s work, and right now, I want to create.” This from Sarah Bessey in her piece, “In Which I’ve got a Song to Sing.” Word. Go read it.

Finally, spend some time at my friend Joel’s. He’s been “writing for the sake of contemplation,” as opposed to writing for the purpose of platform building. He’s a friend from my community here in Fayetteville, and he’s working it out. I’m glad to know him.

I’ll drop in next week and give you guys an update on things in the Haines’ house, but thanks for visiting my friends. They’re definitely worth the read.

Now tell me, what have you read this week that’s worth passing along?

Nationalistic Platitudes and Hokum Pokum (Alakazam).

“Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.” ~Mark Twain

On any given day, my three older sons can be seen marching through the house, arms cocked at rigid right angles and swinging, fists clinched. “You’re a grand old flag, you’re a high flying flag, and forever in peace may you wave,” they sing each attempting to outdo the other with their vim and vigor. They ask me to chime in, to follow in their footsteps and march out the rhythm. Sometimes I do.

They have learned this song at school, it being lyrically safe and a relatively inoffensive piece of nationalistic hokum in which buzzwords like “God,” and “grace,” are conspicuously absent. The absence of those buzzwords does not particularly bother me. After all, I’d rather teach my children about God and grace unencumbered by the bounds of national identity, but that is a discussion for another day.

This Saturday, I was cleaning the dishes and Ian was sitting at the table recreating the battle for Helm’s Deep and repeating the opening line to the Grand Old Flag ad naseum. (It’s the little things that drive a parent nuts; am I the only one?) Somewhere around the three-hundredth repeat, it struck me–”forever in peace may you waive.”

“Ian,” I stopped him, “do you know what ‘peace’ is?”

“Not really,” he said. He turned back to his sketch, back to the orc hordes advancing on the heroes. There was probably a pretty good parental moment in there, and I’d like to tell you that I seized it. The juxtaposition of orc battles and the Grand Old flag had me dumbstruck, though, so I let the opportunity pass. (I’m sure there was some daydream in there of Aragon waiving the stars and stripes victoriously over the battle grounds as he spurred the boys to victory!)

I turned back to my dishes, considered the line–”forever in peace may you waive.” We sing this song, and the great many like it, all the while looking for the next thin red line–Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador, Iraq, Somalia, Iraq again, Libya, Syria, Korea again, (I feel like I should throw another Iraq in there for good measure).

I am thirty five years old, and there has not been a day in my life that the flag has flown in peace, at least not as I think of peace. And don’t get me wrong, I love my country and I turn inside out when someone burns the flag, but this doesn’t change the fact that we often exchange peace for platitudinal notions of it. We love to fly words high, let the wind whip them around for dramatic effect. And we don’t relegate this penchant to nationalistic tendencies, at least not in my experience. But that, too, is a discussion for another day.

Words are easy. Doing is not.

Hokum Pokum, Alakazam.