Elanna Herbert reads 'Crow'

Elanna Herbert reads her poem 'Crow'

Australian ravens courtesy of https://xeno-canto.org/species/Corvus-coronoides

This poem appears in 34-37 Degrees South 2025 - An Anthology of Poetry from members of the South Coast Writers Centre. 

Fresh words brought to you by the South Coast Writers Centre

Transcript

Crow by Elanna Herbert

give me your fractious words, that I may peel away their skin

suck the rind for scraps of your knowledge           let me learn

what little I have with which to draw wisdom, or stain survival

talk to me again of predation & war                        show me

                                                                          Krähe (German)

glacial plains between the Odra & Elbe, teach me the growing

of wheat & of feudal villages, remind me of the widow picking

windfall apples beside the road, then talk stark of churches

dynasties, endless wars & those marching migrations, kingdoms

purges, Reich & battlegrounds of the fallen, whose flesh you so

lovingly feast upon, below the castle wall

                                                                           Crāwe (Old English)

valleys of weavers & blacksmiths, guide me safely across your

trusted rill, where damp banks hide nestlings in a rising mist, let me

hear your secret chatter, messages woven tight in lost cottages, talk

to me of  watermills, plagues, rebellions & strange religious passions

unfurl the poisoned decision to take sail

                                                                           Fheannag (Scots Gaelic)

your three draped in heaving cloaks of black, that together we might

flense a winter feast of doom, send again for the clan & then show me

the Clearances,  the tenant child at the  cottage door, stooped  in

thin silence, define home then

explain its gossamer thread of return

                                                                           Préachán (Irish Gaelic)

omens & transformations, but do not speak aloud your words for 

starvation or death, those long blighted twins of Éire you so easily found

& once you are sated, remind me of those thousand thousand farewells

evictions, exiles, clarify the word forever, then bring to me your forced

departures & transported thieves, so that together they might explain

                            your supplicant’s ease of losing her culture