At Dverse, Kim M. Russell invited everyone to try writing poems that used at least one of the sets of four words found on a chart used for vision tests in the UK. I could have let that go, but then I noticed that most of the sets had enough assonance to sound interesting--not exactly rhyme, but the chiming sounds some people prefer. I had to play.
Agricultural societies tend to detest crows because they eat seeds and crops. The West Nile Virus, however, raised sympathy for surviving crows. They dislike humans generally, even if they bond with a few individual humans, and have a very poor record as pets. They can become friendly to an individual without becoming pets; there are individuals the local crows like and individuals they dislike, always, so far as is known, for good reasons. As birds go, crows are clever. They can be fun for their human friends to observe. They really do tell "news" and "secrets" that are interesting, from their point of view.
Ravens, which look like crows only much bigger, and can be dangerous, can also be even more fun to observe if you become their friends. Ravens have been observed in the high Blue Ridge Mountains; in the past they were even occasionally found in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, but in my lifetime they've not been seen at elevations as low as my town's. (Like all wildlife, their numbers have decreased as human population increased.) A visual illusion makes things seen from one of the windows at my house look closer or larger than they really are; even my mother, usually reliable about these things, honestly believed the black birds walking around the spring branch looked so big they had to be ravens, but no, they were crows. Ravens probably never did live in Baltimore, except when Edgar Allan Poe imagined a pet raven tormenting the human it had adopted by squawking "Nevermore!" Ravens fascinate people who live where they do. An English-speaking raven is a character in Priscilla Ann Bird's new e-book, where the central characters are the nicest kind of sasquatch, the kind who can make intelligent conversation with humans if the humans don't panic.
Both crows and ravens occasionally offer things that might be food to other animals. If this behavior is rewarded, it will persist. The ravens who brought bread to the prophet Elijah in the Bible may have had supernatural guidance to provide things a man could live on for several days. People who have observed this behavior in ordinary situations think the birds use their human (and other animal) friends as tasters. If we eat something and live, they'll eat it themselves and find out how easy it is for them to digest. Sometimes, too, they know they can eat something if only a bigger, stronger lifeform will tear open the packaging--skin, or cardboard and foil. And a crow or raven could be trained to steal food from the garden of a person it didn't particularly like and deliver the food to a friend, though more likely as an occasional prank than as a primary food source for anybody.
So I was thinking about crows and crones, P. Bird's raven character and my feeling of good will toward crows, and a lot of quatrains popped up on the computer screen.
If face can have too big a nose
then of such faces crows have one.
A life of scavenging's the cause.
It fluffs and shakes its feathers even.
Perhaps in ancient times there were
connections between crows and crones.
The crabbed ladies called to "Our
dear crow allies," late in summer.
To each black crow some crone gave name
and learned the name the crow would use
to call her. By such modest means
bonds between crows and crones arose.
While raiding fields a crow could hear
and fly back, swiftly as crows can,
ere children were sent to remove
the crows, who flew home swift and sure.
By sight no crone could know her crow
but each could croon a little verse
by which their bonds birds, man could see;
hearing, their friendship would renew.
Our New Age types might want to assume
that all was joy and beauty once
before fence, factory, plane, car, van
disturbed the equation and its sum
but I had rather keep aware
of birdlice, black mold in the caves,
the rotting fish tossed on the sea,
the sourness curdling in the cream.
If hungry, crones might eat their crows.
If angry, crows might peck crones' eyes.
Crow cult and culture cringed away
before the teaching of the Cross.
Yet still crones may greet corvids with
Hey, pretty bird, I remember you
and from time out of mind the thought
always returns, and may be true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU0Hasj1fpk for Buffy Sainte-Marie's song, misquoted above, whose tune does not fit these lines
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/American_Crow/photo-gallery with links to facts about crows
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