Erin Kavanagh - An 'Amodern' Antiquarian
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The Crow Road...
This poem and series of illustrations are part of a collaborative academic performance which I created with Iain Biggs for the AISLE-UKI & LAND2 Conference at Sheffield Hallam University, September 2017. More information on how this project was created can be found on my blog here
After the delivery, I was asked where the poem itself could be found - so here it is, with some of the accompanying images (although they lose their narrative coherency when in this static form), supported by music from Omnia, which influenced the initial idea.
(On the crow road
There is a river of sound
That sails from thought to memory
A prophecy
Of provision
Guiding battles through the flood)
Once upon a time
A tale was told to me
Of a road lined with echoes
On which a song is sung by crows
On the outside reach of hearing…
A storytelling of light
Playing to the tide
Haunted by an absence
Pecking at words
We hide
Behind a masquerade
Seeking
The lonely mountain ways
Our tail a fringe of forgetting
(On the crow road
There is a myth that has no name
But everybody knows
A girl and a bird
Weaving magic
Out of fear)
“It’s the same story the crow told me
It’s the only one he knows
Like the morning sun you come
And like the wind you go.”
And like the wind we go
Chasing melodies
Dancing in notation
"I am made of nothing,” the crow said
“When night tires it sheds a void
Of down into hungry trees,
The shrapnel of dreams
Catching on branches,
Where nothingness settles and becomes fragmented
Flying on borrowed wings.
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"I carry this darkness upon my back
And my eye is broad of vision
To see the footprints left behind
And the secrets sunshine tries to hide.
My nest the margin
I hear the curses from centuries gone
And the muttering of madmen in the breeze.”
The crow turned on her shoulder
As if expecting somebody else to speak.
She noted how his eyes wrapped cloud
Reflecting things she only wished were there,
His beak as straight as the roads he took
Cloaked in a coal-sheen skin
And brighter than a midnight pyre.
(On the crow road
There is a girl with feathers in her hair
She dreams of friends and firesides
And when she flies
Revelations rain in the half-notes
Guiding waymakers through the door)
“I am made of thinking,” the girl replied.
“When other minds stop at the boundary of their way,
I rise a little higher
To view the wall from the other side.
Sometimes, I rest upon it's head
Watching other travellers turning past,
Frightened, obedient to the grey edges of their cage.
“I too have learned how to follow pathways in the sky
And to see with my eyes tight closed.
I have learned to listen to the speakers
Who have no sound
And to read the weather
In a pattern of cattle
Who do not lie like sentences.”
The girl paused
As if unaccustomed to being heard
The crow noted that she was sat on stone
Which may once have cut a glen in two.
Her clothes were those from an earlier weft
And her hair was longer
Than the years she wore.
(On the crow road
There is a girl with a bird at her side
Together they are as still as a tree
That leans with the wind
But never falls
Marking direction with the turn of a thought)
​
The now familiar pair moved on
Into the hinterlands
Collecting those who fell
With a dark grace
Undertaking the unwanted tasks
Of men who zigzag
Around the silent spaces.
Hefty was their burden
Unafraid to stand before the edge
Rooted in the making of hiraeth
Maent yn mynd am dro
Rhwng tirlun a thirwedd
Yn ôl eu cynefin
A'u dychymyg blaenorol
“I am not blind,” the crow agreed
For I have the eyes of every soldier
And the long-forgotten flock
Tell me their woes
Although you may think me cruel
It is a gift I share
To go beyond horizon’s glare.
"Many a one for him makes mane,
But nane sall ken whar he is gane;
Oer his white banes, whan they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair."
With kith and kin and heft and haw
The spectre of both crow and girl
Caught at the crossing with a superstitious air
“To the queens of war:
Three crows fly like ghosts from another time.”
The girl with a beak and the crow with long hair
The girl with a beak
The crow with long hair
The mother who watches in streams
(On the crow road
There is a forest of shadows
Some who saw the bird at their cradle
Some who heard twa corbies
On the mended wall
Tidying the ground)
They are the recollections of childhood
The isolation of a calling
Digging in the ruins of your belief
​
​
Once upon a time
This tale was told to me
From a girl who cast no shadow
And a corbie with a child’s shawl
On the crow road
Where there is a river of sound
That sails from thought to memory
​
- For in the morning sun we come
And like the wind
We go