Common Pigeon
Called Rock Dove, Columba livia,
Paloma brava, “rats with wings”—
of all birds, surely the most ignored,
dishonored, despised.
No birder exults, adding you to their life list.
On the dinner plate: squab.
And yet:
Able to fly 93 miles per hour on your black-barred wings.
Your longest recorded flight: 7,200 miles,
France to Saigon, in twenty-four days.
One 1918 trench-taken messenger pigeon,
Kaiser, holds your record life-span: thirty-one years.
Also: America’s longest-held POW.
First victory-paraded, then kept for breeding.
Another messenger,
shot down and battle-blinded on the Meuse-Argonne line,
took wing again, delivered the capsuled note:
“We are along the road parallel to 276.4.
Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly
on us. For heaven’s sake, stop it.”
One hundred and ninety-four soldiers lived.
As did the bird, Cher Ami. Saved by an Army medic,
given the French Croix de Guerre,
standing now in a Smithsonian display case, on one taxidermed leg.
Domesticable, a consorter with humans.
For this, your lives treated, too often, as ours are.
Subject—objects—of many studies and books.
For instance, Making Pigeons Pay: A Manual of Practical
Information on the Management, Selection, Breeding,
Feeding, and Marketing of Pigeons,
© 1946 by Wendell Mitchell Levi. Once a child who raised pigeons.
Some who keep you in rooftop pens and train you to race
have loved you,
waiting for months for one who didn’t return.
City-falcons hunt you.
City-humans, sitting on benches, share with you their bread.
Your ring-necked cousins
arrive each late June to eat my tree’s ripening mulberries.
Crows larger, louder, less peaceful, come then to drive them away.
Your average weight, a large coffee mug’s twelve ounces.
Your lives in the wild, 2.4 years.
Wing tip to wing tip, roughly twenty-three inches.
Your first-light conversations
held on an air conditioner’s twelfth-story pigeon-sized ledge—
even the furious-at-being-wakened recognize this sound as true affection.
We, who tell children they must not touch you,
gave you this habitat and story,
You are like us. You want to live.
You do what you must. You preen. You scavenge.
Are kept—like us—off places to rest on
only by spools of barbed wire. Are shooed. Are cursed.
Like ours, your newborn are helpless.
You live amidst and between us concealing your nests,
your dead, the first awkward flights
of your young.
You share the tending of eggs, the feeding of hatchlings.
Like us, you have learned the timing of stoplights.
Like us, you are adaptable, resilient, ingenious.
You return, when needed, to dwelling on riverside cliffs.
Meaning: you will be among the slower to vanish.
Meaning also, among the longer to suffer.
You will glean, like us,
this world for as long as you can.
Lift with your strong, slightly comical cere-topped beaks
its joy-scraps, grief-crusts, recalcitrant seeds.
In flocks crowding any corner and park,
you will hide amid flapping flusters and flushes of iridescence
your pigeonish judgments, jokes, meditations;
keep opaque from our knowing also the instruments—
magnetic? aural? optic-nerve sextant?—
of your solitary, almost spiritual, home-seeking navigation.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023), as well as nine previous poetry collections, two books of essays, and four books collecting and co-translating world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield’s honors include the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and China’s Zhongkun International Poetry Award, which she was the first American and the first woman to receive. A chancellor emerita of the Academy of American Poets and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Hirshfield founded Poets for Science in 2017.
Read more poetry by Jane Hirshfield in Terrain.org: three poems, Letter to America: “Spell to Be Said Against Hatred,” “Today Another Universe,” and three poems.
Header photo courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Jane Hirshfield by Curt Richter.
