It’s easy to forget that this whole ChatGPT/“The Darkling Thrush” thing started with a simple nod of the head to McNulty’s Ascendance, a book that I could easily identify with, one that helped remind me how I feel about Nature, and the Olympics, in particular.
Originally, I was going to include a different second poem called Breath that ends with: “Timeless beauty and human grief/between these poles/the world’s suffering wakes anew/with each striking sunrise.”
However, after all the long-winded discussion following my comments on McNulty’s “Varied Thrush Calling in Autumn,” somehow it seems appropriate to circle back and mention this McNulty poem, which complements the one previously posted.
DECEPTION PASS BEFORE THE BOMBS FALL
Navy jets strafing the heavens,
the trees gather small intermittent silence
into themselves.
I walk out through wet winter brush.
I stop to listen to the story of a leaning cedar
as it folds its bark over an ancient burn.
Along charred heartwood
I feel the rough burnt edge of old bark,
the burgeoning growth of healthy sapwood,
as a fighter jet splits the sky.
Into the leaf’s-breadth of silence
that follows, a winter wren utters
Its clear, ebullient song.
Its notes pierce the darkness of war-noise
like a blossom of light, resplendent
with an ounce and a half of hope.
Although I’ve been in that area once or twice, I didn’t remember it clearly so I looked it up in Google: “Deception Pass State Park, Washington’s most visited state park, features accessible, stunning old-growth forests, particularly in the Hoypus Point and Hoypus Hill areas of Whidbey Island. These, sometimes 700-850+ year-old, Douglas-fir and cedar forests offer miles of hiking trails, providing a rare, low-elevation, and easily accessible glimpse into the region’s ancient, pre-settlement ecosystems.”
The Whidbey Island Naval Station is just south of the area. I’ve only driven by it once or twice, but I remember thinking the Naval Base seemed strangely out of place so near these old-growth forests.
The poem seems balanced on that incongruity – the stillness of the ancient forest blasted with the sound of jets taking off and landing.
Of course, it’s probably not literally true that “trees gather small intermittent silence/into themselves,” but they do block most noise, and the Pacific Northwest rainforests seem to do a particularly good job of doing that.
Perhaps that silence is what makes hiking in the forest so meditative and allows us to notice things we miss when we are distracted by the chatter going on in our heads. Luckily, I’ve never encountered the kind of jet noise McNulty describes here while hiking in PNW forests, but I’m often distracted by the sound of passenger jets flying over while hiking Mt. Rainier or other Cascade hikes. There seems to be no place where you can totally avoid human noise pollution.
Luckily, that cacophony doesn’t manage to entirely drown out the elegant Winter Wrens’ song, a song offering hope that man’s destruction won’t destroy Nature, that we, like the “leaning cedar as it folds its bark over an ancient burn,” will be able to restore what our bombs have destroyed.
Unfortunately, our current bombing of Iran barely leaves us “with an ounce and a half of hope.”