Black Crow

Black was the without eye

Black the within tongue

Black was the heart

Black the liver, black the lungs

Unable to suck in light

Black the blood in its loud tunnel

Black the bowels packed in furnace

Black too the muscles

Striving to pull out into the light

Black the nerves, black the brain

With its tombed visions

Black also the soul, the huge stammer

Of the cry that, swelling, could not

Pronounce its sun.

Bent in emptiness

over emptiness

But flying.

-----Ted Hughes.

"But the crow is something. The way it flies...The noisy caw. Listen. Just listen...Staying in touch like that. The frantic call that means danger...Their sleekness. Their shades. Its so black in there you can see purple in there. their heads. At the start of the beak that sprout of hairs, that moustache thing..probably has a name. But the name doesn't matter. Never does. All that matters is that it's there. And nobody knows why. It's like everything else-just there ..The thing about them is they're all practicality. In their flight. In their talk. Even in their colour. Nothing but blackness. Maybe I was one and maybe I wasn't."

---Roth, The Human Stain

'[T]hey have always been great survivors...crows, after all, are faintly disgusting creatures, with their pickaxe beaks and big, scrawny feet. No matter how often we see them harmlessly bouncing across open pasture or ragging through breezy skies, in our mind's eye we associate them with the aftermath of battles. We imagine them tearing at flesh and uttering harsh cries of predatory triumph.

The easiest way to distinguish crows from rooks at a distance is to count their numbers: a crow "passes its life as one of a pair isolated from neighbours by a fierce territoriality . . . Rooks, by contrast, live, feed, sleep, fly, display, roost, fall sick and die in the presence of their own kind". Hence the old East Anglian adage "When tha's a rook, tha's a crow; and when tha's crows, tha's rooks".'

---Andrew Motion

'It’s the tribalism of crows that intrigues... Individually, they might not be attractive, but together they’re almost mystical. “The rook’s voice is dark, earthy, coarse, tuneless but in aggregate it possesses a beautiful and softly contoured evenness.” The numbers are always large; 40% of Europe’s crow population is thought to be in Britain, and the largest recorded roost was 65,000 birds (in the 1970s at Hatton Castle in Aberdeenshire)...[C]rows are an integral part of British folklore. These birds were seen as legislators, hence the collective noun for rooks, a parliament. (Collective nouns for other species of corvid are “a murder”, “an unkindness” or “a parish”.) Gathering in the trees of old estates, rooks were thought to mirror the cruelty and wisdom of human affairs.

It becomes clear that there’s a fidelity to place in crows that transcends the years. [C]orvids are able to sense an “aura of sanctity” on terrain where, centuries ago, there used to be a rookery...“royal rookeries” (an overlap of rookery and roost) and “ghost rookeries” (an abandoned rookery that is now the site of a roost). '

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O black and unknown bards of long ago,

How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?

How, in your darkness, did you come to know

The power and beauty of the minstrels' lyre?

Who first from midst his bonds lifted his eyes?

Who first from out the still watch, lone and long,

Feeling the ancient faith of prophets rise

Within his dark-kept soul, burst into song?

---James Weldon Johnson

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Black crows...Black crows invaded our country..and they pointed to me.

---Steve Reich