Oracle

Picture: Nineteenth century image of a Carrion Crow from Morris's English Birds, digitally adapted.

 

An old illustration from my collection called The Morrigan's Dark Ministers, here:

www.flickr.com/photos/29320962@N07/sets/72157610356313494/

 

The ORACLE

 

The curse of the oracle I bear:

Baring uncomfortable truths

To those with too much power.

 

My heart, a small receptacle

For a kingly soul, beating old blood

About a body battered and maligned.

 

I spoke truths of children

Serpent tailed; Athene dropped her stone

In wrath, making Lycabettus,

 

And banished me from the Acropolis,

Turning black my bone-white

Feathers, beak and claw.

 

*

 

I shall draw the keeper’s wrath

Away from jays and slit-eyed foxes.

Of lead-shot cruelty I caw,

 

And hang dead, wired up like lightning

Zigzag, or a hooked and hanging

Question mark, zeroing to ground.

 

Cut me down gently, bury me,

Let my black fluid flow back

To Earth, who made me.

 

The curse of the oracle I bear:

Baring uncomfortable truths

To those with too much power.

 

Source material: In Greek mythology, the crow, personified as Cronus, was an oracular bird, and was said to house the soul of a sacred king after his sacrifice. The crow was cursed and banished by Athene after he reported to her that Herse, Pandrosos and Agraulos had plunged in terror from the Acropolis after uncovering a child with a serpent’s tail. She did this after dropping the stone which she had been carrying towards the Acropolis, thus forming the nearby Lycabettus Hill. See Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 6, 7, 25, 50. The second half of the poem describes the plight of a particular crow, known to the author, who happened to fly within range of the gun of a bloodthirsty gamekeeper.

Done