The
encounter seemed iconic of so much of what we humans are inflicting on the wild
with our insensate machines. Not just one life taken, but a whole segment of an
ecosystem disrupted and deprived. Like wolves or sharks, owls are apex
predators, and their removal from a system has disproportionate cascade
effects. My own little home locale would surely suffer more rodents and snakes
were it not for the Wood owls who drift through the nights and call-and-answer
with querying hoots.
According to
birders’ bible Roberts, our
subcontinent hosts a round dozen species of owl, ranging from the great
‘horned’ eagle owls to the tiny Scops owls no taller than the length of your
hand. In their nocturnal discreetness, with their sometimes unearthly calls,
it’s little wonder they’ve attracted superstitious awe in many cultures across
the world. (Remember Shakespeare alluding in Julius Caesar to the forbidding sign of an owl flying in daylight?)
No less so in southern African peoples, amongst some of whom the owl is
regarded with fear, if not outright hostility. An owl alighting on a rooftop is
often regarded as the harbinger of a death in the family, and some
conservationists have deplored what they perceive as the consequent
slaughtering of owls. Matthew Zylstra, however, is probably right in arguing
that it’s more complex than that: attitudes within any given society are highly
variable, and the killing of such animals, though technically at times taboo,
results as much from the modern erosion of traditional reverence as from the
implementation of ‘superstitious’ fear.
South Africa’s
premier eco-poet, Douglas Livingstone, touches on something of this in an early
translation of Shona poet Noel Kashaya’s poem, “Owl”:
When the
children are all asleep, all light
extinguished,
he starts to wheel
the world:
this son-in-law of darkness.
With silent
senses, his eyes bambara –
groundnuts
in a hollow stone, he knows
everything
he sees, despite the darkness. [...]
No doubt it’s
that eerie silence, punctuated by an unnerving screech or drum-like grunt, and
the preternatural ability to navigate and hunt in darkness, that has prompted
humans’ unsettled sense that the owl may be wiser than they are, privy to
magical knowledge.
Oddly, I’ve
found relatively few southern African poems centred on owls, though there may
be many more passing mentions, such as this one from a stanza by unfairly-neglected
Zimbabwean poet Rowland Moloney (from “Maleme”):
A shooting
star zips over the hillcrest,
Trailing
smoke. Leopard coughs, owl perceives,
Night snake
slides into the leaves.
The prows of
kopjes forge through seas of grass.
The owl is
always there, penetrating us with those fierce, astonished eyes. It’s indeed the eyes that transfix another Zimbabwe-resident
poet, Noel Brettell, confronting him with himself, his own vulnerabilities and
inadvertent cruelty. His poem “Wind and an Eagle-Owl” begins with the poet-speaker
riding out into the hills in the wake of a stormy night’s quarrel with his
wife, nature itself reflecting his mood, only to make a shocking discovery:
On the
shouldering air, peevish, lamentable:
And in a
fence, the great bird trapped and dying
With
splintered scapulae spreadeagled there.
You luckless
fellow of our night of wind,
Who through
the breathing solitudes had hunted,
And blindly
struck, like us, pinned
And broken
on the barbs that we had blunted.
The poet
searches for “a stick to kill you with”, and encounters only a terrible hatred
in the owl’s “wildwood eyes”.
Though the
imagery is viscerally immediate, Brettell’s owl is in a sense subordinated to
the marital spat, becoming a symbol of it – unlike, say, Douglas Livingstone’s
famous poem “Gentling a Wildcat”, which is wholly about the speaker’s
relationship with the dying animal and its fundamental nature. The impulse to
utilise the owl as symbolic of an inner emotional life also governs Peter
Strauss’s lovely poem, “The Owl and the Moon”, from his 1999 volume of the same
title. The “insomniac” speaker strolls
out into the garden, when
an
owl
Up in the
righthand row of trees
Hears me,
and hoots like a bicycle pump,
Protesting –
his warning
Quite
unmistakeably pointed my way.
Such
singling out!
Such
ominousness! I should be afraid.
This mythic
dread does not quite persist in the “warm” evening, though, and the presence of
the owl fades from the poem, as the speaker mulls over his life, feeling an
obscure need to “confess” (to what we are not told, though “Venus” might have
something to do with it). At any rate, the speaker concludes that his
particular demons “are not of the dark”. The poem concludes with a kind of
gentle mysteriousness:
 |
| By Marie-Lan Nguyen (User:Jastrow), 2009-02-28, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6911343 |
This moon
preserves recessions, reserves, profundities,
Secret
darkness between the leaves. As if
A woodcutter
were working there, the garden shouts and thunks
Like a
pulse, like a heart in the ribcage –
An owl calls
from the garden, the crickets cry:
My demons
are not of the dark.
Not
unrelated is the late Don Maclennan’s poem “The Owl of Minerva” – also the
title poem of a complete collection (self-published in 2008; republished in the Collected Poems, PrintMatters, 2013). The owl of Minerva or Athena, most famous
from the tetradrachm image dating to the fifth century BC, was traditionally
associated with wisdom and perspicacity; an owl flying over a battle formation
was interpreted as Athena’s blessing. Maclennan prefaces the collection with a
quotation from Hegel: “The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the
falling of the dusk” – meaning, it seems, that we understand things only on the
cusp of their disappearance. More revealingly, a second epigraph, by Philip
Caputo, reads: “Anyone who does not acknowledge the darkness in his nature will
succumb to it.” Accordingly, the poem “The Owl of Minerva” is,
characteristically, more about the recognition of our own pretensions and
limitations than about either the owl or Minerva.
The signs of
his life are
a white
mound of excrement
below the
tree
of fur and
tiny bones,
and gentle,
warning hoots
in the
gathering dusk.
You cannot
see
his
predatory journeys
through the
dark
to fill his maw
with mice
and other
lesser creatures,
only the
chalky evidence
that
something was alive
that thought
its tiny consciousness
would last
for ever.
The owl and
I acknowledge each other
but the
small cat muses on,
transfixed,
apparently, by the terminal moraines
of the
barren garden
After my
meeting
the cat has
gone from the quad
and the
hills and plains of his wet desert
The owl,
supreme, has marked the wall
with
painterly excrement
white
against the liver-dark bricks
If the owl
has not already eaten the kitten, it seems only a matter of time...
Easily the
most thorough-going use of the owl in southern African poetry is Michèle Betty’s
recent volume, Metaphysical Balm
(Dryad Press). The bulk of the poems are present-tense brief narratives, incident
reports if you like, from the episodic ‘biography’ of a generalised,
symbolically-laden “Owl”; the poems bear titles like “Owl’s birthright”, “The
baptism of Owl”, “Owl confronts a crisis”, and “Owl’s alchemy”. That this is
partly modelled on Ted Hughes’ volume of poems, Crow, is indicated by at least two poems, “Owl encounters Crow” and
“Owl and Crow converse”. Betty is clearly offering a riposte of sorts to Hughes’
ugly, bloodied bird-character which, in that first encounter, sends Owl fleeing
“in trepidation”. But in the next two
poems, Owl frees herself, or is freed by a “mystical creature” – Owl becomes a re-mythologised
vector for addressing “spiritual longing”, for finding a “New Brain”, or Light
itself. Betty draws on both modern neurological science and the “legion of old
souls” embodied in numerous ancient traditions, from Athena to the Mayans to the
Biblical, amplified by literary allusions from Hopkins to Zarathustra. These stories overlap and cross-fertilise, until one can, in a “utopian
exhale”, find a kind of acceptance. The poem of that title reads:
of a
twilight sky,
a Sickle
Moon
and the
Evening Star,
Owl discerns
mist
collecting
resplendent
in humid
air,
weightless
as the down
feathers of
her youth,
dispersing
enigmatically
to settle in
solitude,
refracted
and reflected,
in puffs and
pockets,
on each and
every
shadow
touched.
Owl becomes,
in this view, a kind of embodiment of our kindlier, more spiritual natures. If
only those of us who, intentionally or inadvertently, destroy owls or their
habitats, would listen more closely.
*****
Visit Dan Wylie on www.netsoka.co.za
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