Turning in the widening gyre

A huge flock of pelicans played for a long time in thermals above farmers market this morning.

As they floated, reeled and turned in unison, light caught them differently adding a beautiful kinetic dimension to the spectacle.

I only had my cell phone with me and the flock was quite high, so these images do not do justice to this magical, tangible (albeit fleeting) experience of the beauty of migration.

This flock is probably American White Pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos). They are most likely en route to Mexico, since I live on an avian superhighway, the Central bird migration Flyway, but they could be a flock which is planning to overwinter on the waterways of this neighborhood. If so I look forward to meeting them again during this winter’s paddles with pelicans on the lakes.

The pelican sky dance show helped to offset the general things falling apartness of the times we are enduring, what with the rough beast slouching ever nearer. Then too there was the comment today at market, from someone who shared that he was born and raised in Minnesota, USA:

“I can’t understand you because you don’t speak English.”

Perhaps truth is the Minnesotan couldn’t understand me because, in spite of being retired US military (thank you for your service, sir), he has never read the Irish poet, playwright and Nobel literary laureate William Butler Yeats whom I was quoting.

I didn’t bother to tell Mr Minnesota (who I would hazard a guess has a significant portion of recent Germanic/Scandinavian non English speaking ancestry) that my mother tongue is English and has probably been so since the origins of English language around the 5th century AD. My genealogy statements are informed by DNA analysis from National Geographic genome project.

Nor, since I am so done with engaging with strangers on that topic, did I dignify his “where are you from” question with any answer. With the spectacle of migratory birds dancing in the sky above us, all I could offer the audially impaired Minnesotan was this:

The Second Coming (1919)

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Postscript:: Dear American people: please STOP asking anyone who presents as what you perceive as different from yourself, where they are from. It is racist, xenophobic and above all profoundly othering. STOP doing it.