Poems by Steve Bailey

Quoth the Owl, Nevermore

by Steve Bailey

From Canary Summer 2022

Steve's home is between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean in the James River watershed. Canoeists and kayakers on the James are bound to see a Great Blue Heron or two standing in shallows or gracefully gliding overhead among the bass, catfish, and longnose gar.

I could hear him in the late afternoons when golden summer sunlight pushes through the trees and makes the leaves facing it look luminescent against their counterpart's black background. He would hoot from a tree in the wooded lot behind my house, and I walked around to see if I could spot this bird, but I could not. He was somewhere up high in one of the tall, majestic trees. I hollered into the quiet lot.
"Hey, Strigiformes! You're making all this noise, and the sun is still up. You are supposed to be nocturnal. Didn't you read your user's manual?"

There was no response. As soon as I was back in my chair on my deck, my beer slightly warmer than when I left it, the owl let out a couple of hoots. As the Brits would say, he’s a cheeky rascal.

I have seen owls used in literature as symbols of death. Many Native American tribes believe that the sound of an owl in daylight is a bad omen. I never put stock in superstition, no matter the source. I feel the same way about the presence of ravens I see when I go on walks. They are all over my neighborhood. Ravens are a symbol of sorrow, omens of death. But this is Richmond, Virginia, and Edgar Allan Poe is our dark poet. So, these jetty birds are as appropriate here as Cardinals are in St Louis.

An interesting story about an owl in Salem, Oregon, was reported on MSNBC in 2015. Joggers, including the town's mayor, were attacked by one such creature, presumably protecting its nest, or maybe just adverse to humans engaging in physical fitness. But rather than hunt the bird down, the city marked off the area and put up warning signs. In other words, they surrendered a jogging trail to this fine feathered, not-friend. It was a show of respect for nature.

I woke up this morning to chainsaws screaming as they tore into trees in the wooded lot behind my house. Then, in the afternoon, I heard a mechanical sound and walked over to the lot to see its source. It was a Caterpillar Forest Machine, a powerful apparatus with an arm like a backhoe that rips up small trees and casts them to the side, in a pile, like fallen soldiers in a hopeless war. The wooded lot is being made ready for a new house.

A neighbor came by and stood beside me. "That's an amazing machine," he said with admiration. "At this rate, it will have that lot completely cleared out by the end of the day." Despite some fifty years of environmental rhetoric, the loss of natural habitat by defoliation goes on unabated. With the global population growing on an average of eighty-one million people a year, it will only accelerate. As a result, no creature is safe from eradication.

Now I sit on my deck, watching the sunlight make leaves glow, and listen for the owl. It is not Strigiformes' hoot that is the bad omen. It is his silence.