Poetry
Ten years ago I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Truthfully, Kilimanjaro is not a climb: it’s a very long walk! But its altitude (5895m) is a serious issue, and the thin air at the top is a challenge for anyone.
Not for ravens! The ravens on Kilimanmjaro are white-necked ravens; and like all ravens they are master aeronauts.
Right now, I’m reading Walter Bonatti’s The Mountains of my Life, in the fabulous translation by Robert Marshall. Bonatti recounts his first ascent of the north face of the Grandes Jorasses (a true climb!) with Cosimo Zappelli in 1963. They are high up a sheer ice slope when they encounter a crow – see below.
Meanwhile, here is the poem, Circus.
Toward evening I thought I heard the croak of a crow. I wanted to believe it, but it seemed improbable in this inhuman place. But the crow was really there and indeed it even seemed to take pleasure in our company. Black and furtive, it sailed lyrically on the rising currents of the wind. With searing lashes of its wings and hissing dives and zooms, it first abandoned and then resumed its riding on the currents of the air, sporting with poetic abandon. At times it was suspended in the blue, motionless as if clinging to the sky, and then suddenly it would describe parabolas, coils, and spirals of extraordinary elegance. It’s shrieked every so often, with a harsh, sonorous cry, and in the silence that followed, it seemed to enjoy its cries echoing in the empty sky. At times it grazed me at an acute angle as it swept along the outlines of the wall; but more often its shape appeared fleetingly and piratically against the whiteness of the glaciers, or etched superbly against the blue dome of the sky. They say the crow is a bird of ill omen, but I don’t believe it. In a place like that, to meet its presence was infinitely friendly.
Bonatti, Walter (transl. Marshall, Robert). The Mountains of My Life. London: Penguin Books, 2010
