Widespread Pigeon
Referred to as Rock Dove, Columba livia,
Paloma brava, “rats with wings”—
of all birds, absolutely essentially the most ignored,
dishonored, despised.
No birder exults, including you to their life listing.
On the dinner plate: squab.
And but:
Capable of fly 93 miles per hour in your black-barred wings.
Your longest recorded flight: 7,200 miles,
France to Saigon, in twenty-four days.
One 1918 trench-taken messenger pigeon,
Kaiser, holds your document life-span: thirty-one years.
Additionally: America’s longest-held POW.
First victory-paraded, then saved for breeding.
One other messenger,
shot down and battle-blinded on the Meuse-Argonne line,
took wing once more, delivered the capsuled be aware:
“We’re alongside the street parallel to 276.4.
Our personal artillery is dropping a barrage immediately
on us. For heaven’s sake, cease it.”
100 and ninety-four troopers lived.
As did the chook, Cher Ami. Saved by an Military medic,
given the French Croix de Guerre,
standing now in a Smithsonian show case, on one taxidermed leg.
Domesticable, a consorter with people.
For this, your lives handled, too typically, as ours are.
Topic—objects—of many research and books.
As an example, Making Pigeons Pay: A Guide of Sensible
Data on the Administration, Choice, Breeding,
Feeding, and Advertising of Pigeons,
© 1946 by Wendell Mitchell Levi. As soon as a baby who raised pigeons.
Some who hold you in rooftop pens and practice you to race
have cherished you,
ready for months for one who didn’t return.
Metropolis-falcons hunt you.
Metropolis-humans, sitting on benches, share with you their bread.
Your ring-necked cousins
arrive every late June to eat my tree’s ripening mulberries.
Crows bigger, louder, much less peaceable, come then to drive them away.
Your common weight, a big espresso mug’s twelve ounces.
Your lives within the wild, 2.4 years.
Wing tip to wing tip, roughly twenty-three inches.
Your first-light conversations
held on an air conditioner’s twelfth-story pigeon-sized ledge—
even the furious-at-being-wakened acknowledge this sound as true affection.
We, who inform kids they have to not contact you,
gave you this habitat and story,
You’re like us. You wish to stay.
You do what you have to. You preen. You scavenge.
Are saved—like us—off locations to relaxation on
solely by spools of barbed wire. Are shooed. Are cursed.
Like ours, your new child are helpless.
You reside amidst and between us concealing your nests,
your useless, the primary awkward flights
of your younger.
You share the tending of eggs, the feeding of hatchlings.
Like us, you have got realized the timing of stoplights.
Like us, you might be adaptable, resilient, ingenious.
You come back, when wanted, to dwelling on riverside cliffs.
That means: you’ll be among the many slower to fade.
That means additionally, among the many longer to endure.
You’ll glean, like us,
this world for so long as you may.
Carry along with your sturdy, barely comical cere-topped beaks
its joy-scraps, grief-crusts, recalcitrant seeds.
In flocks crowding any nook and park,
you’ll disguise amid flapping flusters and flushes of iridescence
your pigeonish judgments, jokes, meditations;
hold opaque from our figuring out additionally the devices—
magnetic? aural? optic-nerve sextant?—
of your solitary, virtually non secular, home-seeking navigation.
Jane Hirshfield is the creator of The Asking: New & Chosen Poems (Knopf, 2023), in addition to 9 earlier poetry collections, two books of essays, and 4 books accumulating and co-translating world poets from the deep previous. Hirshfield’s honors embody the Poetry Middle E book Award, the California E book Award, and China’s Zhongkun Worldwide Poetry Award, which she was the primary American and the primary girl to obtain. A chancellor emerita of the Academy of American Poets and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Hirshfield based Poets for Science in 2017.
Learn extra poetry by Jane Hirshfield in Terrain.org: three poems, Letter to America: “Spell to Be Mentioned In opposition to Hatred,” “Right this moment One other Universe,” and three poems.
Header photograph courtesy Pixabay. Photograph of Jane Hirshfield by Curt Richter.
