Inner Rook

The rook's hoarse call has an essence of Old England about it.


---Aubrey Seymour.




{These are the last of my notes; after that I'm dry, clean. Nothing to say, but go over again and again what I already know. The black books are elsewhere. From here on its a plunge...How will time pass now without them? Dougal: Happy Birthday: send word!}

The crow's restless soul has something of Old Lahore about it.

In the silent courtyard of my home, a crow cawed
Then the sweet rain fell and I remembered you.

---Nasir Kazmi (courtesy of Astarte)



Soft then the voice of rooks from indrawn throat, three or four times repeat
A clear note, and full often there in treetop cradles
charmed by some unfamiliar sweet impulse we cannot guess at
Gossip among the leaves they love, when showers are spent,
To visit again their baby brood, their darling nests
It is not, to my belief, that God has assigned them
A special instinct, or Fate a wider foreknowledge of things;
But when the storm and shifting moisture of the air have changed their courses,
and the sky-god now, wet with the south-wind, thickens what was rare,
And rarefies what was condensed, then, too, change their spirits' fleeting phases.

---Virgil.

'They came at us in a single dark outpouring when the individual calls of the rooks melted into an all-consuming torrent. I seemed to be hearing a sound produced before the fundamental elements of life-silicon, carbon, and hydrogen-had been broken down, redistributed and composed into ten million species. It had an irresistible quality, like the gravitational pull of the moon, luminous like the roar of the stars.'


OVER the land half freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed,
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as a flower of grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass

--Ed Thomas

There, where the rusty iron lies,
The rooks are coming all the day
Perhaps no man, until he dies
Will understand them, what they say
The evening makes the sky look clay
The slow wind waits for night to rise
The world is half content. But they
Still trouble all the trees with cries
That know and cannot put away
The yearning of the soul that flies
From day to night, from night to day

---Charles Sorley