Audubon, this moment is to remember <br />the passenger pigeon whose tremendous flocks <br />took hours to pass through your autumn skies, <br />and though you did not think it possible to diminish <br />them by mere hunting, it seems important to <br />remember the many men who with guns and pots <br />and poles waited at dusk for the pigeons to arrive, <br />bringing thousands of pigs to be fattened deep into the forest <br />where decoy pigeons were propped in trees, eyes sewn shut, <br />where nesting sites were desecrated so squabs fell to the <br />ground like pelting rain, to be eaten and eaten and eaten <br />in New York and Philadelphia where markets brimmed <br />with millions of birds downed by bark peelers and tavern owners <br />and cooks who had abandoned their jobs to follow them into the <br />forests of Kentucky and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, into the <br />dreamy old-growth forests where their scarlet eyes blinked like a <br />galaxy of stars and their slate-blue feathers covered the branches <br />like a multitude of leaves, weighing down the trees because <br />passenger pigeons needed huge flocks to sustain themselves, <br />weighing down the hickories and oaks because their souls needed <br />large forests to thrive. Audubon, how strange if you could see <br />the Kentucky woods now ghosts of what they were, and how strange <br />if you could see our springtime skies without passenger pigeons <br />heading north in synchronized flocks so graceful and large <br />they could startle even the greatest imagination.<br /><br />Paula Weld Cary<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-country-without-passenger-pigeons/
