Anna Crowe
The Mysterious Starling
…It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
‘Going, Going’ by Philip Larkin, High Windows
…killed while hopping about a tree.
Emptied of song and spirit to a poverty
of feathered skin, Aplonis mavornata,
brown and drab, lies in a drawer
in the British Museum, provenance unknown,
for a hundred years. Until Storrs Olson
tracks down a mention in the poet Byron’s
uncle’s captain’s log, with other extinctions:
the bodies of Liholiho and Kamamalu,
king and queen of Hawaii, whom measles blew
away in London, are being shipped
to Honolulu, where their people’s lips
part like a wave around the prow
in a great cry. But now
the Blonde sails on to touch at Mauke where,
in the space of just two hours,
Bloxham, ship’s naturalist, will shoot a pigeon,
kingfisher, starling, as Captain George Anson,
Lord Byron, borrowing one Maria
Graham’s notes—scant and drier
than a dead starling—writes: killed while hopping
about a tree…The birds were gone, done hopping,
by 1970, when one DT Holyoak,
naturalist, returned to Mauke.