This is a piece of cinematic music in three parts describing the day of a crow in a devastated country. First, the crow awakes to a desolate landscape, then it takes to the sky and approaches the sea, gaining a strange sense of perspective and harmony as it glides through the air in a state of hallucination generated by hunger. Finally the crow lands back in the original landscape, knowing that it cannot fly across the water.
I based it on a poem I wrote earlier this year, when reading about certain events in Irish and African history. The narrator of the poem feels a strange bond with the crow in their shared critical circumstances, as he has no one left to reach out to.
Skeleton Crow
Skeleton Crow, you follow me wherever I go,
Across the fields and town in the evening glow,
You wait in the shadows, by the empty stream,
Your hunger to still, my bones to pick clean.
I don’t hate you, that’s the way things go,
Who knows why we were visited by this woe,
God the Father surely is in the know,
But no answer to my prayer does show.
I could imagine that in a different world,
You’d have a different shape, a different form,
And we’d meet each other on different streets,
Not as vultures or in rags so sleek.
Once everything here was fair,
The valleys green, the perfumed air,
Now pestilence has come like the savage blight,
There is no refuge from our plight.
Out of the shadows you came, when I was alone,
Weak with pain and expelled from my home,
My bed is the stones, my roof the sky,
And no full meal will I eat before I die.
One day, maybe, you will fly away,
And my only companion too will not stay,
For all others have sailed to Amerikay,
Or into the air did melt away.
