Audubon, “Wild Turkey Cock, Hen, and Young”
Thursday
I saw a remarkable sight yesterday as I was driving along an Appalachian road in southern Tennessee: a flock of six or so wild turkeys crossed the road ahead of me. In commemoration of the occasion, I’ve found three poems about wild turkeys. Together, they make not a bad argument for why the wild turkey should have been our national bird.
I start off with this prose poem by Mark Seth Lender, which captures their fierceness:
Field Note
By Mark Seth Lender
Late in the day Wild Turkeys call from the near woods. An unearthly sound and a warning. A boney spur mounted on the back of each leg is like a driven nail through the end of a length of oak. Angered, they fly up, rake down. Then there will be blood – yours – and likely stitches. Benjamin Franklin wanted Wild Turkey, not Bald Eagle for the national bird. Draw close – but not too close – and carefully observe Wild Turkey’s magnificence, their feathered iridescence, their fearlessness and strength of form, and see for yourself if the man who braved the wrath of lightning was wrong or right.
This Tim Poland poem, meanwhile, speaks to their aristocratic self-possession and their seeming sense of entitlement. I wonder if, as such, they stand in for Americans in general, how we take for granted our many benefits (Social Security, Medicare, home deductions, infrastructure, etc.) while looking down on the government that makes them possible. Maybe they should indeed be the national bird:
these wild turkeys
November 17, 2009
By Tim Poland
For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen
the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral
Character. He does not get his Living honestly… For the Truth
the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird,
and withal a true original Native of America… His is besides,
though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not
hesitate to attack…
—Benjamin Franklin, 1784
we’ve taken to feeding these wild turkeys
and they hate us for it, hold us in contempt,
lured from the burden of forage,
baited into ease and dependence,
it’s our fault and they know it, so they
turn on us, demand we continue what we’ve
started now that the damage is done, their
wildness revised to fistfuls of grain on the ground
a hen wanders in from another flock
on the far side of the ridge, saunters in
from the wild to peck the easy corn
with her angry and sated cousins,
the ancient grain a new delight to her,
until a delegation of other hens arrives from
over the ridge, cuts her from this indolent flock,
and nudges her back to the wild fold
see the tom by the fallen poplar, wing feathers
chestnut and buff, eyes like polished pebbles,
he does not condescend to display for us,
we do not merit his vanity,
no threat to him, we are pathetic and
worthy of no more than his disdain,
servants to be pecked and prodded if
we are too slow to deliver up the corn
Finally, Max Reif observes how ancient they seem. Encountering them as I did, he says that they appear to predate Reason, which suddenly strikes him as a “Johnny-come-lately”:
Wild Turkeys on the Road Near Home
By Max Reif
Tribal elders in their feathered garb
pow-wow in the middle of the road.
Bright red wattles shake
from bright blue faces
(reminding me of
rabid football fans) .
Smiling drivers stop,
though with a slight discomfort
to see something so ancient
that Johnny-come-lately, reason,
makes no sense of it at all.
So if the wild turkey was our national bird, it would capture our tendency to lash out fiercely and to our sense of entitlement. But it also points to deep roots that go beyond reason. Benjamin Franklin had a point.