This workshop opened with two short prose extracts written by British writer and TV presenter, Helen Macdonald best known for her memoir H is for Hawk (2014). Taken from a perhaps less well-known work, Vesper Flights, they are wonderful descriptions of watching a majestic bird fly. These appear in the chapter ‘The Falcon and the Tower’. Here is one of them:
“A narrow black anchor is falling fast towards the west chimney as if on an invisible zip wire. Seeing something alive descending to earth at such speed brings a hitch to my throat. A faint echoing call drifts towards us, the unlikely ee-chip, ee-chip of a swinging, unoiled door. It is the male, the tiercel. He swerves, spreads his wings wide to brake and alights upon the rail by a nest box that has been fixed to a metal walkway 100 feet above. He shakes his feathers into place and sits looking towards the estuary, flat-headed, an inverted bullet shaped black against the sky.
“Do you want to see?” Eamonn says, gesturing to his telescope. Through the device, the falcon is oddly two-dimensional, rippling in the bright circle as if seen through water, and my eyes ache as I try to focus on small points of sharpness: the barred feathers of his chest, his black hood, a faint chromatic fringe ghosting him with suggestions of dust and rainbows. He’s exquisite, the colour of smoke, paper and wet ash. He starts preening his feathers, puffs out his belly, half closes his eyes, angles his head back to zip single scapulars through his neat, curved beak. Gusts of wind rising up the chimney face blow his feathers the wrong way. His talons are curled around rusting steel. The wind has ice in it. He looks utterly at home.”
From here we moved on to D.H Lawrence’s nineteenth-century poem ‘Love Storm’.
Many roses in the wind
Are tapping at the window-sash.
A hawk is in the sky; his wings
Slowly begin to plash.
The roses with the west wind rapping
Are torn away, and a splash
Of red goes down the billowing air.
Still hangs the hawk, with the whole sky moving
Past him–only a wing-beat proving
The will that holds him there.
The daisies in the grass are bending,
The hawk has dropped, the wind is spending
All the roses, and unending
Rustle of leaves washes out the rending
Cry of a bird.
A red rose goes on the wind.–Ascending
The hawk his wind-swept way is wending
Easily down the sky. The daisies, sending
Strange white signals, seem intending
To show the place whence the scream was heard.
But, oh, my heart, what birds are piping!
A silver wind is hastily wiping
The face of the youngest rose.
And oh, my heart, cease apprehending!
The hawk is gone, a rose is tapping
The window-sash as the west-wind blows.
Knock, knock, ’tis no more than a red rose rapping,
And fear is a plash of wings.
What, then, if a scarlet rose goes flapping
Down the bright-grey ruin of things!
We particularly loved the specificity and pathos of the final line and the idea of brightness combined with ruin.
The third text was by the popular American poet Mary Oliver, entitled ‘I Looked Up’, with the wonderful opening:
I looked up and there it was
among the green branches of the pitchpines –
thick bird,
a ruffle of fire trailing over the shoulders and down the back –
color of copper, iron, bronze –
lighting up the dark branches of the pine.
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