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There are flowers in the brambles

where my soul takes flight

and can rest upon the scent,

fragrance of all lost and found beliefs

gathered where the dubious repent.

Angels are the fools seen treading there,

never mind the presence of hell’s fear.

 Feathered wings float softly on the wind,

fanning flames of all that I hold dear,

never minding brambles piercing them,

never minding colors bleeding through.

No safer harbor beckons me to come;

the feathers shelter everything that’s true.

Copyright ©  1-7-2020

Juli Maltagliati

After a visit to the Wordsworths in the Lake District,
Coleridge caught a glimpse from his stagecoach
Of a gigantic flock of birds as it swooped, rose then fell
Above the frozen, wintry fields of a passing farm.

It was November 1799 and he described the phenomenon
As “a vision” in his Journal, then detailed the way
This “vast flight” drove along “like smoke, and expanded
Then condensed”, then continually shifted shape.

First he saw the starlings as an arc, then as a globe –
A force field of matter that changed from an oblong
Into an ellipse, “glimmering & shivering, dim & shadowy,
Now thickening, deepening and blackening!”

The vision stayed with him all his life – a mystery as to how
“The one be many.” How thousands of creatures
Operated as a single entity, performing extreme stunts
Of swirling acrobatics – free from gravitational pull.

Coleridge was at the time devising an ideal community,
A utopia, which he called a Pantisocracy,
And which, together with his fellow poet, Robert Southey,
He planned to introduce to America.

Now here were starlings creating a miraculous order
Just by instinct. It was an object lesson,
Spelled out by nature herself, as to how human beings
Might happily interact and co-operate.

Watching starlings, on Otmoor, two hundred years later
I saw them spelling out the same lesson:
A towering organism was moving in perfect formation
With no discernible leader. No President.

It whooshed through the air at forty miles an hour.
Each bird reacted to another bird’s movement
In a hundredth of a millisecond. They tumbled and banked
In synchronized, spatial symmetry – collision free.

They moved like iron filings drawn by a magnetic field
To create their sophisticated, aerial society;
A society that flies, instead of creeping along, suborned
By unnatural pressures and alien orders,

And the flock’s structure echoes the physics of magnetism
With each particle’s electron spin
Aligning with its neighbor’s in a symbiotic harmony
Like a metal entity becoming magnetized.

It hints at the discovery of a universal principle
Which seems to tap into a natural order:
A physiological mechanism, happening almost simultaneously,
In birds that are separated by hundreds of feet.

Since they can mimic us with an unusual facility
It shouldn’t be too hard to mimic them:
To rise high on nature rather than wrecking it;
To enjoy a life that no one can condemn.

There are no controlling starlings exercising force;
Not a single bird’s left behind in isolation.
Not one wastes time voting – they’d lose height if they did –
It’s anarchy in motion, and a glorious revelation.

Heathcote Williams

If a robin redbreast in a cage

Puts all heaven in a rage,

How feels heaven when

Dies the billionth battery hen?

Driving back from the literature festival

through Otley handsome in black stone

with white revers of painted windows and doors

I follow behind a tin truck

gaping an open vent high up at the back.

Stopped at the lights the gap is filled

with broad snout, a wet black sponge for sucking up

sweetness from deep in summer grass.

You crane your head in the hole sideways to let

each eye in turn roll up at the sky.

Deep in the tumbril shock you don’t speak.

I know where you’re going this summer’s morning

and feel you know it too though how

when no-one has ever come back with tell-tale

smell of blood and fear on staring hide?

I imagine though I can’t see the shrunken dug

flat as a perished rubber glove.

The street is called Wharfedale View. It looks across

to where the moors throw a green quilt

for miles under a high sky. Why can’t I just

draw the steel bolt on the tailgate

and let you run and run up there till you drop?

But the lights change. You turn Left; I go Right

for Leeds and perhaps I’m quite wrong

and you’re just being moved on to new pasture.

Then why can’t I safe home sleep

but see still your face laid along the tailgate

with one moist eye turned up questioning

whether I would have drawn that bolt

if you’d been able to ask me in a tongue

I couldn’t kid myself I understood?

© 1985 Maureen Duffy

From The Extended Circle: An Anthology of Humane Thought by Jon Wynne-Tyson

Open Gate Press, 2008

The civet cat
is a gentle fruit-eater,
a shy, nocturnal mammal,
from the family
“Viverridae.”

Native to the tropical
rainforests, woodlands,
savannah and mountains
of Southern Africa,
China and South East Asia,
occasionally,
when food is scarce in nature,
as an act of desperation,
these vegan animals
will eat the fruit
of coffee plants.
The tough beans
(of little nutritional value)
are left undigested.
And herein lies
the problem.

Humans addicted
to morning/afternoon,
indoor/outdoor,
weekend/hourly fixes,
obsessed with trying out
the new, the ‘exotic’
have discovered
that the civet’s
stomach enzymes
cut the bitterness
from the flavour
in their coffee cup –
even adding
some “robust” extras.

Coffee beans
from force-fed civet cats
(made to eat
ungodly amounts
with laxatives
to maximise
the collection
of “processed” beans,)
are now desired
as the finest “gourmet,”
fetching astronomical global prices,
10 to 50 times higher,
than their counterparts.

In conscience-less cafés
in Indonesia, Bali, China,
the Philippines, New York and London,
single cups of “civet coffee,”
“kopi luwak,” “caphe cut chon,”
“cat poop coffee” are sold
for upwards of $30, £50…
costing the lives,
freedom and well-being
of many poor civet cats.

Highly endangered,
rapidly disappearing,
mercilessly hunted,
(trapped at 6 months old,
confined to tiny,
rusting, wire-floor cages,)
horrifically abused
and exploited, in new,
make-shift “factory farms,”
they are sold on to live
animal markets,
when their digestive systems
finally fail.

Skinned alive,
murdered,
eaten to boot,
(in Southern China,
roasted whole,
sometimes still living,
with garlic, soy and ginger…)
these nonviolent beings
are turned into “Tiger”
“Dragon” and “Phoenix” ‘soups,’
(their perineal glands first scraped
to provide the buttery,
caramel taste in sweets,
and to “stabilize”
expensive perfumes.)

When SARS first appeared
in humans, in China, in 2003
“Severe Acute Respiratory System,”
many knew (and researchers discovered)
that the origin was to be found
in the tortured, savoured civet cats.

Their hellish existences,
at Man’s cruel hands,
(immune systems attacked
beyond self-repair,)
are now thought to have made them
“intermediate hosts”
between bats and humans
for COVID-19 too.

More Karma for the comatosed.