Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Tuesday
As I watch birds cluster around our birdfeeders—recently we had a cardinal and a pair of purple finches join the titmice, nuthatches, chickadees, and goldfinches we are accustomed to—I find myself returning to a magical poem written many years ago by my father. An enthusiastic birder as well as a poet specializing in light verse, Scott Bates combined two of his passions in “The Bird Watcher’s Christmas Dinner.”
Although it seems straightforward enough, the poem is actually about mystical transformation. Multi-colored birds, drawn to a feeder, turn an adjoining cedar into a Christmas tree. Partaking of a feast that appears miraculously, the birds themselves become a feast for the soul.
The transformation, my father writes, occurs “trysmegistically.” Wikipedia informs us that Hermes Trismegistus was a legendary figure from ancient Greece that originated as a combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. The wisdom attributed to this figure “combined a knowledge of both the material and the spiritual world, which rendered the writings attributed to him of great relevance to those who were interested in the interrelationship between the material and the divine.”
In ancient times, birds were seen as having the power to move between heaven and earth, just as did messenger-of the-gods Hermes. The winter solstice for pagan cultures and Christmas for Christian cultures are seen as a time when the membrane separating the mystical and the mundane is particularly porous. In the Christmas story, angel (to apply the words of the Edmund Sears Christmas carol) bend “near the earth to touch their harps of gold.” Such is also the case in my father’s poem, where we see angel-like birds “feasting and flying and doing a show/ For watchers on the earth below.”
We watchers, struggling through cold, dark days, live in hope that the world will be mystically transformed. “Peace on the earth, good will to men and women”: that is what midwinter rituals like Christmas are all about.
The Bird Watcher’s Christmas Dinner
By Scott Bates
You can’t exactly call it greed
When birds at feeders feed and feed
On endless quantities of seed;
It’s sleeping in the cold all night
And doing prodigies of flight
That gives a bird an appetite.
They wait their turns with impatience
Perched on the cedar by the fence
Like so many Christmas ornaments,
Cardinal, goldfinch and chickadee,
Turning it, trismegistically,
Into an ancient Christmas tree
With angels hurrying to and fro
Feasting and flying and doing a show
For watchers on the earth below.
