The inchoate intervention
The inchoate intervention
(edited 13/3/21)
an early morning drive and the need to protect.
Early morning. On the way to my parents.
No traffic. Crossed the sleeping river.
Stopped at the lights, just before the bridge,
road coming down from Lidl,
Royal Mail Sorting Office on the right,
the Lea industrial estate to the left,
two birds beneath in the road entangled;
a crow, sharp beak glossed in the dawn sun,
chasing a dove, pure white against the tarmac,
wings broken by the other’s thrusting cuts.
I watched tormented the frantic dance,
the dove’s untutored instincts to survive
and I, thinking only of its beauty wasted,
would have intervened, driven over the black,
when a fox, from behind a scavenged bin, pounced
and I was left stalled on a conjecture
witness to the choate cruelty of Nature.
I wasn’t sure about the structure, but it grew on me. Survival is cruel and it’s always a quandary on whether to intervene when we see something like this happening.
I particularly like the line — thinking only of its beauty wasted —
I often wonder if our species was ever observed by a far superior intelligence, would they watch in studious awe while we destroyed ourselves?
Or would we be considered as beautiful as your dove.
G, Am still playing around with form and structure; this is one of the experiments. Wanted to keep it conversational. But we are strange beings; I have no qualms in shooting a grey squirrel, for example, but when it comes to things like doves the heart quivers.
desperate desire is not good enough
thinking only is unnecessary perhaps, thinking of just that
or maybe
and I’d have intervened, thinking of
its beauty wasted, driven over the black,
but a fox, from behind a scavenged bin,
pounced and I, stalled on a conjecture
railing against the choate cruelty of Nature,
as a witness played a part.
You correctly called out the weakness of “desperate desire”; it had been bothering me because i wanted to convey the atavistic, innate essence, and that did not capture it.
so it’s untutored instincts now? untutored survival is better, an instinct is untutored, but survival can be both tutored and untutored, an animal’s survival is based on instincts so it’s untutored survival.
Kind of like the edits Ifyouplease proposes. This is why i am not a nature poet. What if the dove had a disease that the crow would prevent healthy doves from catching? The truth of Darwin makes this universe a horror. The only slight redemption is intervening at the right time and place, if you can figure that out!
As you say it is intervening at the right time, and not with the heart.
And in nature there is no morality; it is entirely a human construct, to curb our own nature; or is it? Food for contemplation; a good reflection Bhi
Dougie
Did the crow see anything but a chance to eat? Did the beauty of the dove bother it when it was cutting the other to pieces?
There are checks and balances in nature, and then we layer on our own complexes, which makes the mix a whole lot more interesting.
A reflection is but to ponder and understand.