Seabird's Blessing

A poem by Alice Oswald and some thoughts

Photo by Ashkan Shahrokh on Unsplash

Seabird’s Blessing

We are crowds of seabirds,
makers of many angles,
workers that unpick a web
of the air's threads and tangles.

Pray for us when we fight
the wind one to one;
let not that shuddering strength
smash the cross of the wing-bone.

Oh God the featherer,
lift us if we fall;
preserve the frenzy in our mouths,
the yellow star in the eyeball.

Christ, make smooth the way
of a creature like a spirit
up from its perverse body
without weight or limit.

Holy Ghost of heaven,
blow us clear of the world,
give us the utmost of the air
to heave on and to hold.

Pray for us in this weird
bare place - we are screaming
O sky count us not as nothing
O sea count us not as nothing 

This poem is by Alice Oswald. I love its cleverness (God the featherer), and its passion (we are screaming). In the poem the birds’ prayer is spoken from their perspective of sea, sky and wind. I love the intensity of the cry of the poem, as it picks up the energy of that incredible seagull cry. I love the beseeching voice at the end of the poem to the great existences of sea and sky ‘count us not as nothing’.

Rowan Williams has written of this poem:

‘when poetry connects worlds by imagining the utterly strange, it allows the utterly strange in turn to build a bridge back in to our thinking. Imagining the bird’s prayer is inevitably imagining our prayer; imagining the bird is imagining the self. Pondering what is not native and familiar to me is one way of discovering about myself what I can never know by egocentric introspection……………..metaphor is a means of discovery, not a decorative comparison.’

This is why I work with imagination and metaphor in my work as a therapist. When we name something as something different, but still within ourselves, we can see the world differently. So "I am angry” can become a simile “It is like having snakes in my belly'“ and then a step further and a metaphor “There is a dragon in me cruising the thermals and it is rising, it is rising fast and seeking its prey”.

When we are with another person it is easy to imagine that we can know them and that we can bridge the gap, reach in, understand. Often we can not do so, and to imagine that we can is at best insulting to the person’s autonomy and arrogant, and at worst it can be obliterating and abusive. I have learned a lot about this from listening closely to people speaking from an anti-colonial point of view in the last few years in particular. The lessons learned here have wide application.

So, here is my prayer for now - that I may learn from that which is beyond and alien to me, to be more aware of the ways that the world can be.

Photo by Joshua Kettle on Unsplash