The governance of animals

Nesting things that nest among the trees

Dear friends, 

For years, in the run-up to an American election, my friend and colleague Krista Tippett would broadcast a poetry-focused episode of On Being. My feeling about her choice was that she wished to elevate language in the run-up to something that so often commodified it. 

In the theatre of elections, greed, rage, hatred, deception, and manipulation can be seen. One of the raw energies of an election is “I want to win.” Alongside that we see: ambition, love, desire for change, intelligence, skill, intervention, and civic concern. I do not know how to imagine a life without politics. In fact, I like politics when it’s done reasonably well, so I wouldn’t want to imagine a life without it. But I do not know how to imagine bearing with what politics — in a polarised age — has become.

Manhattan, 2023. Photo by Pádraig Ó Tuama

So to poetry. The very kind Eugenia Leigh asked if I’d submit a poem to the Adroit Journal, and they accepted it and it’s published this week. It’s about one of my favourite birds: the Aegithalos caudatus (called the Long-tailed Tit in common parlance; Tit being the anglicisation of the French tête meaning head — many of these birds are distinguished by the colour of their caps).

These gorgeous birds have, as might be expected, a long tail. They make extraordinary soft nests that are more like a sock than anything else. They organise themselves well; one parent finds items for the nest while the other guards it. After the eggs are born and are being incubated — the parents share in the latter endeavour — one of them will go out to find food. Since the other might also need to go, fortunately there are uncles on hand (I’m not joking). There seem to be a larger amount of chick-less uncles, so they become surrogate parents. All of this l learnt after researching these gorgeous birds — called a volery in their collective noun — during Covid when I needed to find a metaphor for the pick-n-mix way I write. 

He picks fleece from wire,
fluff from dryers, bog cotton, moss
and hair. Silk from webs, flax
from spiders’ eggs, packs it all with lichen.
She plucks feathers from the corpses
of the wren, the siskin,
blue tit, coal tit, goldcrest.
Adds her own feathers too.

She takes tickets, tissues, scraps
from the pockets of passersby.
That child who dropped a ribbon
will never find it.

Thousands of these things,
carried in a tiny beak,
or clutch of claws. It takes weeks.
They take turns to keep watch
on their soft sock of bricolage,
camouflaged at the fork.

I want to make sure the kind people at Adroit are honoured for publishing this poem, so I’ve put only a portion of it here - but you can read the rest of it for free on their website.  (You can also — and I recommend this more than my own poem — read Blu Mehari’s utterly beautiful poem in response to a Rothko painting here.)

I turned to the Long-tailed Tit because I admire the government of their affairs: collaboration, hawking, care, speed, beady eyes on the watchout for buzzards… I love their little nests, the ways they find what is proximal and make something beautiful from the available material of their environment. They ensure the future by creative collaboration today. I’m not going to push the metaphor too much, but there are aspects of the intelligence of these tiny birds that I have found fruitful, both as an artist as well as a citizen. 

That’s my question for today: what other-than-human living beings do you turn to, in admiration for their governance?

I await the outcomes of this pressured week in the United States in Turtle Island, and we could all benefit from your language about things that burrow and fly and nest and hunt and survive and care. They have been doing this for longer than we have been doing what we do; there are things to learn. 

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Poetry in the World

A list of events: Online, in the US (Durham, NC), and the Scottish island of Iona 

PS: I’ve got two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other. You can pre-order them wherever you buy books. 

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November 3, 10, 17, 24, December 1, Online

Fill your Sunday evenings with peculiarity, poetry, and ancient literature: I’m giving new online lectures on “Strange Stories of the Bible”. Register here.

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November 18–19 Durham, North Carolina, US

I’m giving the William Preston Few lecture at Duke University. Details here.

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March 10–15 and March 18–23 2025, Isle of Iona, Scotland

I’m holding two Poetry Unbound retreats on the gorgeous Scottish island of Iona; each retreat is the same. Both retreats are booked up, but you can get on the waiting list by contacting the folks at the St. Columba here.