Judy Gahagan: Together with Crows

I love crows

as people sometimes love cruel guardians,

their black dilapidated skirts

de-frocked whisky priests, my heart

goes out to them, their terrible flapping,

pathetic legs, our desolation.

We live in leaflessness together.

There is no family life here

in the winter forest.

Isn’t it better

to be be starkly visible,

black truths stalking the margins

of ghostly ballrooms with a curse,

to be waiting in dead gardens?

All my journeys are winter journeys

across the lines left by silence.

Today the sky streams backwards

we walk starved on cracked ice.

Gahagan is an Anglo-American poet and psychologist. In 1994 she wrote of the selection including “Together with Crows”: “These and many others of my poems are written in a state of mind fallen into disfavour in the last fifty years – the enraptured subjectivity of the impersonal but lyrical Ich of German romanticism… I want to express the feeling of participatory consciousness and enchantment which the natural world invokes and to express a sense of connection between that world and the human – both inner and personal and outer and political.”