About Birds

Gwen Sayers

I mean Marabou storks, their graveyard
ugliness, layered feathers, baldness. Shit
running down their legs like candle wax.

I mean Harris hawks perched on bare
branches, watchful, waiting
to swoop. Pigeon squawks. Glazed eyes.

I mean my father, when he told me
the hadeda ibis, pecking gravel
in our garden, carries souls of the dead.

I mean the grey and white of a heron’s
open-mouthed palette, composition for
beak, scaly legs, unblinking stare.

I mean turkey squeals, fanned tail,
puffed plumage, chasing us in zigzags
as I trundle with his wheelchair.

I mean my father, when his soul was still
inside his mottled skin. Before the birds.

The Science

Robert Morison proposed that death is a process rather than an event. Organs do not die simultaneously when breathing stops. They die at different rates, with skin living for more than a day. Therefore, life and death are hypothetical abstractions that introduce ‘artificial discontinuities into … continuous processes’. As a physician, I accept ageing, dying and death to be such processes. Medical science redefined the cardio-respiratory definition of death in order to accommodate technological advances like CPR, and to facilitate organ donation where brain death, instead of cardiac death, allowed for organs to be legally removed while the heart was still beating. The law, however, invoked euphemisms to deal with the interface between life and death in order to permit treatment withdrawal for patients in persistent vegetative states. Birds too can symbolise death when brought into poems, ravens and crows commonly. My poem shows death as a process viewed through the prism of birds.

The Poet

‍Gwen Sayers is a poet, physician, and medical ethicist, who has written about end of life decision making, and now writes poetry largely, but not exclusively, in the territory of death and dying. Some of these poems can be found in her chapbook Ghost Sojourn (Southword Editions). Find out more about Gwen Sayers and her work at gwensayers.com.

Next poem: Barn Owl by Alice Huntley