There is a bird outback, species uncertain, pecking at seeds that have fallen to the ground.
Where will that bird sleep tonight? A nest, of course. Birds make nests, though we rarely see them. I rarely see them, anyway. Will they sleep in the sand? Bob Dylan, you recall, became famous, asking in song, in that high nasal tone of his, How many seas must a white dove sail…
Sail, not fly. Interesting choice of words. It works, actually, being eupamistically better than “fly”.
And Bob goes on to ask where the white dove’s flight will end…
…before she sleeps in the sand?
“She”. Better than “it.” Better, too, than, “he”. Plummage or other characteristics can give away, to the trained eye, the sex of a bird, and this is no less so with a dove, but we don’t know about Dylan’s “white dove” and, I’ll bet, neither does Dylan — but the word “she” has a softening, peaceful touch — that female touch (though, in suggesting thus, I risk being declared “sexist” in the year 2026).
So much about words! But words –on their flight — can land smoothly, or crash.
Sea, sand and time. A dove. An answer “blowing in the wind.”
Beautiful, evocative thoughts, images, words.
But not necessarily, at least where white doves are concerned, ornithologically correct.
But such things don’t matter where song lyrics or poems are concerned. Poems and lyrics have their own flight path. I see what the songwriter is saying. The poet, too, when Wallace Stevens writes of the “gold-feathered bird”.
But it occurs to me to ask:
Do birds ever sleep in the sand? I read that some species do sleep in the sandy shallows — to avoid predators. The white dove (the symbol of peace), apparently must, like all of us, fear her enemies and is probably subject to battles and all-out wars that erupt among avian species. I know that bluejays, lovely as they are with those layers of blue, have been known to raid nests (not, I’ve read, a constant practice; just a survival strategy when food is short. And isn’t that what causes many wars? Shortages?)
How far does a white dove fly – or sail – on any given day?
I’ve read that a carrier pigeons can fly as much as 400 to 600 miles in a day. In 1982, the skeletal remains of a carrier pigeon were found in the chimney of a home in Bletchingly, Surrey, England, believed to have been among the 250,000 carrier pigeons trained by volunteers of the British National Carrier Pigeon Service and provided in World War II to the invading British armies during the 1944 D-Day invasion. Attached to it (we’ll say “her”) leg was a red cannister containing an encripted message believed to have been intended for a Royal Air Force Bomber Command. She likely had flown from the heart of Nazi-controlled Europe on her vital mission carrying her messager when other forms of communication between armies were deemed less reliable.
The message in the cannister was addressed to XO2. Whoever that might be. It was, as noted, encripted and has not, to this day, been de-coded.
(One could only wish it had said….Commander, how about you lay down your arms, and, for God sake, don’t send over any more bombers. These German guys told me they’re damn weary of war. When I left them, they’d flocked — like birds of a feather — into a beer hall./ The last I heard them, they were singing psalms, getting loaded..
Unlikely, of course.
We know no one at that point was weary of fighting. Pace, Bob Dylan, they weren’t about to ban any cannon balls. Who uses cannon balls anymore? Rockets, missilnukes, missiles, drones….those are our modern weapons of choice.
The poor bird never completed its mission. One can, of course, fantasize that during her long flight over the North Sea or maybe over the White Cliffs, her little pigeon’s heart grew dispondent with advancing the purposes of war; that the white dove in her longed to sleep in the sand. No telling why she died, ( broken heart? homesickness? –or why she chose a chimney for her final rest carrying her final message. Perhaps, despite her presumed keen sense of direction, she’d become lost. Lost and despondent.
And somewhere, a bomber commander, code-named XO2, stood waiting at the aerodrome for a message from the front that never arrived. He probably died wondering why he never saw that small gray-feathered spector winging toward him out of the blue.
But, of course, I’ve gone from orthonological reality to bad poetry here. Skylarks, Nightingales, Crows, Flamingoes, Mockingbirds, Wallace Stevens’s “gold-feathered bird” whose “fire-fangled feathers dangle down”. They’ve all had their turn as poetic motifs in the hands of real poets. Why not the lowly carrier-pigeon, service her country? Or even just those wobbly-footed, head-bobbing urban dwellers devour peanuts in every park, now and then summoning enough motivation to take flight and deposit white streaks down office windows, earning them the derogation “flying rats”?
How long does any bird live?
I’ve read three to ten years, depending on all those factors one can imagine — weather, predation, disease, hunters. (I once failed to save the life of a cedar waxwing that, drunk on some purple variety of berry, crashed into a store window, maybe seeing itself, thinking she’d found a companion, or mate, and rushed toward it. End of story.
I could go on about birds. Continue my flight.
But I won’t. And you should be glad.
Except to say — how blessed it would be to be able to fly!
But how blessed to know we are likely to live more than ten years.
Wallace Stevens gets to close us out, for he wrote, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” A)mong twenty snowy mountains, and among many other places. And he gave to the lowly pigeon the honor of concluding his famous poem, “Sunday Morning,” writing how at evening, casual flocks of pigeons make/Ambiguous undulations as they sink,/ Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
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