A beautiful aspect of winter is the chance to rise in the dark at the start of the day. If you’re fortunate, your coffee may be brewing as the sky pales and you catch a flock of crows flying hundred-fold under the last stars, calling out or soaring in ragged spirals before playfully chasing each other onwards to their feeding grounds. The flocks can number in the thousands, taking several minutes to pass, coming from roosts that may contain hundreds of thousands. What better way to enjoy breakfast?
The Importance of Stillness
I was on the train recently, staring at the rails and the blur of sleepers between. If I very quickly moved my eyes against the direction of travel, I caught a glimpse of an individual sleeper and its neighbours; I was able to slow the flow of data just enough to pick out a little detail. Among the many boundaries of (human) perception, high speed, in the sense of a given volume of information over time, was hiding the little things. And making me boss-eyed.
Crow Work: A Kill
A Kill‘s power is in its fifteenth line, in the only spoken text of the poem: “It’s a boy!” It’s a fulcrum and it prises the perception of a brutal, lingering death to show a birth. But it’s no gift.
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