The Thrush Sings Thrice Over.

There’s a thrush singing in my garden. When I let out my hens at daybreak, he’s there, welcoming the new morning. The first time I heard him, about a week ago now, I stood for long minutes. I had no idea that the wind from the top of the hill was lifting my hair, making me shiver. I was inside the song of the thrush. Finally, I was carried down the garden, with my steaming dishes of hen’s mash, calling out the lines from Browning…

That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, 

Lest you should think he never could recapture 

The first fine careless rapture!

I’ve seen him—it might just be a female, of course— fly from my far stand of clumpy willows, out across the fields, but usually he sings in a particular beech tree, establishing his territory for the breeding season. His song repeats on and off through the rest of the day, and is always there as the shadows soften down and the hens are heading to their beds. I’m hoping he and his lovely mate will choose my garden for their nest. Mr and Mrs Thrush don’t always start thinking about lurve quite this early on, but they’re responding to the warm rush of weather that has meant I don’t even need morning central heating. We seem to have left behind the worst ravages of winter behind bang on cue. 

The TV weatherman always makes the point that there are two starts to each season. The astrological start, which for spring is the 21st of March, and the meteorological start, which they seem to think is the 1st of March. But as a Druid, I follow the Celtic farming calendar, which has been with us since the Iron Age. The 21st of March,  June, September and December are the mid-seasons, not the beginnings. Spring started on the first of February, when our little band of earth-magic lovers…pagans, druids, witches, and the like…celebrated Imbolc, the coming of spring. For, although you might not feel very springlike at the end of January, under the soil and in the sap of the trees there is a new thrusting, shooting drive to lift the head and sniff the air and get on with things, from tilling the soil, to some DIY, to raising a family. 

Our Bridie Mantle, or girdle
 People pass through it, tying on their
hopes for the coming year

Imbolc is an Irish word, meaning ‘the milk of the ewe’, andeve n now, February the time of the baby lambs. Imbolc is dedicated to the Mother Goddess and the new life that she brings. She is well-known in Ireland by various names - Brighid Bridie Brigantia, becoming, as the years went on and the religion changed, Saint Bridget. She is often symbolised by the gentle bobbing of the snowdrop, which can literally burst through the last snows, and she's said to drape her green mantle across the winter world, turning it verdent. In her honour, Brigid Crosses are made by weaving rushes into a four-pointed star. As a goddess of healing, she has sacred springs across our lands, and in Solas Bhride Spiritual Centre, in Kildare, Ireland, a Perpetual Flame is tended by the Brigidine Sisters in memory of her, guarded as a beacon of hope, justice and peace.

with thanks to
https://www.blarney.com/st-brigid_s-cross/

It is true that this mother goddess takes a little time to spread her mantle over the cold, hard, earth. Legend has it that if the Winter Goddess, the Callieach, intends to reign over a good, long winter, she will make sure the weather on the 1st of February is bright and sunny, so she can gather plenty of firewood, often seen in the form of a raven picking up sticks in its beak. Therefore, people in old times were generally relieved if that was a day of foul weather. Last year around my area of West Wales it was a lovely day on the first, but this year it was cold enough for snow to fall. So our small ritual was based on the idea that these two had to confront each other; the beautiful maiden of spring and the wizened old hag of winter. Of course the Callieach must lose, and slink away, threatening to return next winter, but we’re not under any illusion that from the 2nd of February onwards there would be nothing but daffodils nodding in sunshine! In fact, it may be that the wonderful, record-breaking warmth we have been enjoying in the past few weeks should be worrying us.

Yesterday, it was ‘as warm as spring’, and I went on a Garden Crawl with some veg-growing friends. This is a bit like a pub crawl, but with tea and cakes as substitute for beer. We saw five wonderful gardens, with polytunnels as warm as a Mediterranean beach. For the first time since last summer, we pulled out my rattan furniture and sat on my lawn in the sun, chatting, enjoying Kate’s greenhouse-grown melon and listening to larks rising from the fields, and my thrush, shouting at the top of his voice.

For me, the song of the thrush is simply the best. Yes, the blackbird and the blackcap are lovely, and the robin has a very pretty tune, while the nightingale’s melody is darkly spine-chilling. But the thrush can lift off the top of my scalp. His song always surprises, full of twists and turns, and not always ‘thrice over’; sometimes he repeats a phrase four times, or twice, but what I love is you never know what will come next…only the bird knows that. It is said that the more complex the song, the smarter the bird, but that can only be true of ‘Passeri’ class of perching birds, because we all knows that Corvus—rooks, ravens, jackdaws—are as smart-as-they-come, and there’s not much to a crow’s song except latent threat and a thread of misery.

Super Worm Moon. With thanks to
 https://res.cloudinary.com/jpress/image/fetch/c_fill,f_
auto,h_400,q_auto:eco,w_600/https://inews.co.uk/wp-content/
uploads/2019/02/shutterstock_205323442-e1550676266368.jpg

Meanwhile, as the new lambs, chicks and fledglings begin their lives, the wheel of the year turns. That’s what I love about celebrating as a Druid; the constant turning of that wheel. Just 21 days ago it was Imbolc;  in less than four weeks time it will be Vernal Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, an astrological event celebrated right back to the Neolithic. This year, that special moment of solar balance falls on the 20th March; twelve hours of daylight, twelve of darkness. The tides will rise as high as they can, while it feels as if the world stands still. And this year, as an added frisson, it will be the third full moon of the year; the Worm Moon…and this will be a supermoon, large, close to Earth and wonderfully ripe for magic. I wonder what we will celebrate on that night?

If the weather continues warm, my true-loving thrushes will have started a brood by then, and may carry on having broods of babies to the far end of summer. I haven’t a clue where that nest may be; it could be in the deep layers of ivy covering my century-old  beeches that line boundary, or it could be in the long, thin strip of land between the garden fence and the edge of the high bank elevating us from the little country road. I’ll be leaving out bits of cotton and fluff for birds to take advantage of, but I doubt the thrush family will use this; they like natural materials for their house. I would love to find it, with its clutch of sky-blue eggs, but I don’t want to look too close. I think it’s best if I just let them get on with their lives, while I get on with mine.

You can hear the song of the thrush here.

Mary Oliver, Eavan Boland, and Alice Oswald

Mary Oliver reading one of her poems at a conference in California.
Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

Mary Oliver was one of my favourite US poets, so it was with real sadness

that I heard of her death at the grand age of 83. In fact a friend told me, via a text, so I was not the only female in west Wales to be affected by her passing.  But she was most loved,  perhaps, in her native American - she won a Pulitzer prize in 1984. For me, her poems touch my druid heart, as they  reflect a deep love of nature, a transendental connection to the spirit world and the human condition. Her poems were subtle yet straight, and ever hopeful. 


Because of her death, our last West Wales book club meeting started by reading  “The Summer Day” from 1992, which is probably her most well-known poem. 

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life?

We talked together of how she it's possible she had an unhappy childhood which might have led her to a huge love of the natural world. In the 50s, she  made a pilgrimage  to New York where her favourite poet, Edna St Vincent Millay,  had recently died, and there met her life partner, Molly Malone Cook. Poet and photographer made a life together in Cape Cod, and it is that landscape she often wrote about, as here, in my favourite of hers, Wild Swans; 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

 She told Maria Shriver in an O Magazine interview, “I am not very hopeful about the Earth remaining as it was when I was a child. It’s already greatly changed. But I think when we lose the connection with the natural world, we tend to forget that we’re animals, that we need the Earth.” This last poem is considered by many as her finest work, a 'death poem that becomes a life poem', as Jay Parini said in the Guardian obituary.

Sleeping In The Forest 

I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

Eavan Boland, is an Irish writer now living and teaching in the USA, she mainly writes of the difficult position of women in Ireland. Cityscape, below, is a favourite of mine. I love the concentration on ‘elver’ –  on my first read, I didn’t recognise the word in the first two stanzas, where it’s used out of context. I really thought she’d invented a word. But it’s a perfect word to use for any silvery, wriggly line, such as a diver, the sudden, bright. low light of the evening sky, and a ‘yearning for the estuary’ which may be a reference to a longing to travel into the distance, which many of us have. Repeatedly seeded through the poem to fix ‘silver’ into your mind, it works as a sort of assonance. At first, the poem's got a very ‘yaowie’ sound…word, surface, waited, day, pause, …elver, how cirrus clouds, edge, elver…Then it begins to use more flat aa’s…Blackrock baths, cracks, I can I can I can, Harry, salt,  as, has, glass…

Cityscape

I have a word for it —

the way the surface waited all day

to be a silvery pause between sky and city —

which is elver.

And another one for how

the bay shelved cirrus clouds

piled up at the edge of the Irish Sea, 

which is elver too.

The old Blackrock baths 

have been neglected now for fifty years,

fine cracks in the tiles 

visible as they never were when

I can I can I can

shouted Harry Vernon as 

he dived from the highest board 

curving down into salt and urine

his cry fading out 

through the half century it took 

to hear as a child that a glass eel

had been seen 

entering the seawater baths at twilight —

also known as elver —

and immediately

the word begins

a delicate migration —

a fine crazing healing in the tiles —

the sky deepening above a city 

that has always been

unsettled between sluice gates and the Irish Sea 

to which there now comes at dusk

a translucent visitor

yearning for the estuary.

More recently, Alice Oswald has become renowned for writing 'nature verse' although understandably, she hates that nomenclature. Oswold is an Oxford graduate who now lives in Devon and loves gardening, ecology and music, all of which find their way subtly into her poetry. She became famous after the publication of her second book, Dart, which was the outcome of years of primary and secondary research into the history, environment, and community along the River Dart in Devon, England. But it's her later works that I really love which include Woods, etc. (2005), winner of a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Weeds and Wild Flowers (2009), illustrated by Jessica Greenman; A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009) and Falling Awake (2016). Here's a favourite of mine, from that collection, Slowed-Down Blackbird;

Three people in the snow

getting rid of themselves

               breath by breath

and every six seconds a blackbird

three people in raincoats losing their tracks in the snow

walking as far as the edge and back again

with the trees exhausted

              tapping at the sky

and every six seconds a blackbird

first three then two

passing one eye between them

and the eye is a white eraser rubbing them away

and on the edge a blackbird

trying over and over its broken line

trying over and over its broken line. 

Finally, here's a poem I wrote last spring, when I found a fallen fledgling. I looked for alliteration (beached boat), assonance, (cat-dragged…back…soft, moth…lift, tissue)… Integral rhythms (I want to live, fly, court, breed) simile (beached boat, moth wings,) and metaphor (cloaked in suede). I hope the poem explains some of how deeply affected I was when I found the fledging.

Fledgling

Cat-dragged to the back porch,

Your wings have micro feathers with pigeon patterns

Your rib cage humped as a beached boat

Cloaked in suede 

Breaths soft as moth wings,

Life is worth the fight.

I lift you on tissue to my palm

You are as light as any bird yet heavy with existence

Your outsized beak opens wide

As if I were your mother,

A silent cry – help me!

I want to live, fly, court, breed, 

Lay a clutch of eggs, raise a brood.

Within the kitchen towels, I twist your neck.

On the porch step I sit 

Heavy with death.