The Birds of War-Torn Afghanistan

I share today a poem by my father Scott Bates, who is an ardent birdwatcher as well as poet. The poem reminds us of an ongoing war that too often we want to push out of our minds.

Through contrasting the natural world with the disasters created by humans, my father expresses his longing for an unspoiled world of great natural beauty. Yet the two worlds are not entirely separate. The Steppe Eagle may be able to ignore the puffs of explosives below him (he’s much more interested in a herd of ibex), but sandgrouse glean in the minefields, russet sparrows move into the emptied houses, and crows and vultures feed on the human dead. The tragedy of the war is captured in images that are all the more powerful for being only indirectly referred to.

The poem brings to my mind a powerful scene in Three Kings, the 1999 David O. Russell/George Clooney movie about the first Persian Gulf War. A woman war reporter, tough as nails (she has to be), breaks down when she encounters a pelican trapped in the oil spills caused by Saddam Hussein blowing up the Kuwaiti oil stations. Seemingly inured to human suffering, she can’t take the sight of innocence desecrated. It is the death of her own innocence that she mourns.

A couple of notes on the poem. The “great game” in the first line echoes the phrase, made famous by Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, referring to the battle between east and west. (Here the great game seems also to be the conflict between humans and nature.) The gyrfalcon freed from the faloncer, meanwhile, is an allusion to Yeats’ great poem “The Second Coming,” which predicts cataclysmic apocalypse “stalking towards Bethlehem to be born.” As Yeats writes, “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” In my father’s elegiac vision, the riches of the orient seem to be a thing of the past. Here’s the poem:

The Birds of Afghanistan

“Hardly anyone has been birding in war-torn Afghanistan for 20 years. . . . Around 460 species of birds have been recorded there, a good record for a land-locked and largely arid country.” Nigel Wheatley, Where to Watch Birds in Asia, 1996

The Great Game of Winter plays in the Hindu Kush

A black-eyed, swarthy-faced, hawk-billed Steppe
Eagle sits on a cliff at fourteen thousand feet
Like Hasan Ben Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain.
He ignores the puffs of smoke in the hills below
And watches a herd of Ibex forage
In the drifts of whirling snow.

Bands of Snowfinches feed on juniper berries.
Siberian Cranes wing southwest over Mount Zebak.
Snowcocks call in the high meadows of Badakshan.
Millions of Teal and Pelicans swim and dive in Hamun-i-Puzak.
(Flowerpeckers, Sunbirds, and Spiderhunters
Have left on vacation for the Indonesian jungles.)
Flocks of Painted Sandgrouse glean with impunity
In the minefields. Russet Sparrows in the east
Move into empty villages. Ravens chat on broken towers.
Carrion Crows and Bearded Vultures enjoy a holiday feast.

A Gyrfalcon soars
Freed from her hood and her falconer.

The Steppe Eagle swings down the Khinjan pass,
Circling down where once Marco Polo went
Amidst the riches of the Orient.

Added note: My father just elucidated for me another allusion in the poem: the “old man of the mountain” was a ruler of an Islamic sect in the 11th century who would get his followers high on hashish and send them out to assassinate his enemies (the word “assassin” comes from hashish).  I supposed this makes Osama Bin Laden the current old man of the mountain, with opium being the drug that fuels his operation.