Pigeon Loft

NOVEMBER 1978

ROBERT MORGAN

PIGEON LOFT

Kept to fight away the hawks from our pen

of fryers, they squabbled and mated

on the eaves of the crib and toolshed.

I imagined high Armageddons between

our virtuous birds and the death carriers

from the woods, in the spring sky.

They landed to peck for corn with the chickens,

cooed and groomed themselves

sleek as dolphins. Straw stuck pubic

through cracks and the small door

in the box nailed to the barn gable.

No matter how bloody after battle, or

storm-driven into other counties, they always

homed accurate as salmon to the crate

no bigger than a transformer where

they dallied out of reach of varmints.

They caked and chalked the ground below

their garret of heat.

Grandpa said they steered not by the sun

or stars, or dirt's magnetic lines,

or memory, or ear, but by the instinct

from God to be messengers, like angels.

The night my uncle died in England one came

and lit on the porch railing there

in the light from the window and later in the dark

till morning without moving.

They were my uncle's birds. That

same night my mother saw in a vision

his death in the burning B-17, and saw

the bird still there at daylight

on the spot where her brother used to sit.

They slept in the high dark, and dropped

out to soar at the stooping barbs,

alert to any whistle. So keen-eared that far above

the fields they heard the trucks down on the

highway and hogs grunting in other valleys,

airplanes in flight south of Greenville,

and listened to the lunge and plunder of

the Atlantic five-hundred miles to the east,

and the many voices beyond.