Afshan Shafi
Note: Published in 1972, Crow: From the Life and Songs of Crow (Faber and Faber) was British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes’s most ambitious work. Hughes’s Crow functions as a visceral creation myth, a fable for end-of days, a folk epic and a potent retort to Creationist and Humanist narratives. Hughes’s Crow is a grand trickster, a fallen angel in search of a female God, a king of carrion and a harbinger of both doom and war-mongering glory. Reading the Crow in the thick of a pandemic is perhaps the opposite of fruitfulness and can instead be seen as a nod to the preachers of paranoia. However, more than anything else, the Crow impresses upon one the virtues of resilience and an almost savage pragmatism in the face of an old order rupturing into a disquieting irreality.
The following is a piece of automatic writing in response to a poem from Hughes’s series.
From Crow’s Theology by Ted Hughes
‘And he realised that God spoke Crow—
Just existing was his revelation
But what loved the stones and spoke stone?
They seemed to exist too
And what spoke that strange silence
After his clamour of caws faded?’
What Crow is Not by Afshan Shafi
Not rain over a lisping blue body
Nor fount, strummed from girded limestone
Neither the music of elves from the ears of gorges
Nor pulse, yawning biliously into catatonia
(I am-bodied darkness—
Disposed of underfoot
Inside saline coffers
And the throats of
Wet urns)
Not the sun rising out of dead grass like smoke
Nor sirens, yellow and scarlet, scaling the walls of fortresses
Neither the dark suspicion of a day stampeding to a blood-halt
Nor the steaming cackle of water as it eats skin from thrashing hives
I am—long wound pared—
A show-bird
dispensed by a magician
Out of a satin rag