In the year of the passenger pigeons
They came in a darkening flood, and the valley of Troublesome
Was heavy with sound. The soft gutturals of their cooing
Were harrows that raked the air and drowned the locusts’ thighs.
They came with a cloud of wings that thundered down the hills
And broke the forest with their weight of flesh. Here fell
A snow of dung, here oak and lynn were shaggy with their nests;
Here field and wood, the grain and stalk lost in a feathered hell.
The hollows of Troublesome Creek were glutted with pigeons.
They blew like wind through the trees, and the shuck-dry leaves
Flew from their scratching on the molding floor.
These were no crows flapping above a cornfield:
This was a fire that ran through patch and brush
Eating the milky nubbins, the tender shoots,
The leaf-hoppers, the cankerworms, and maggots of crane-flies
At the grass roots.
The red agate of the pigeons’ eyes was the color of death—
Death quiet upon a nest, death feeding her curious milk
From bulging crop, death hovering over pin-feathered squab
With whole-eyed glance upon an infertile egg
On twig-lined shelf: the male warming the oval bulb
Between his legs, squatting with drooping wings;
The female taking her turn upon this stubborn fruit
Of their mating. Death was the silence in the stricken yolk
Turning a living semblance to the trusting breast;
Death running with blood-red feet, with wind-bright eyes
Where wing is interleaved with wing and nest with nest.
Come to the hills! Come to the pigeon roost for plentiful flesh.
Come with clap nets, O come with hawk and buzzard to this feast
Upon the breasts of heaven. Prowl with the skunk and fox
To sever these soft throats; light up the stinking sulphur pots
In the night forest. O come with death’s long flail and pole
For this ripe manna. Empty the tree-cotes of their fledglings,
And pile and gather and carry away a dying windfall harvest
With blood-beads hardened in a thousand beaks.
Now have the pigeons perished, the flocking millions slain,
And all the quiet red eyes become a single glance of dust
Blown through the beechwood coves. Now has the winter’s rain
Swept down the simple nests, and now the boughs are still—
Flesh, wing, and eye devoured, a countless horde brought low,
And not a slate-blue feather blows on any hill.