AWAY WITH THE BIRDS

AWAY WITH THE BIRDS

By Stuart McKinlay

There is an unnatural quietness to the darkening night falling over Byres Road. Usually an area straddling a street famous for guys ‘n’ dolls hauling in and out of the pubs and pubs and more pubs, given the limited vision of the Friday night crowds here.

Neil, Dot & Stuart, Tennent's Bar, Byres Road

Yet tonight is differently accented. For one thing the First Minister is lending the experts on pandemics the civic authority of her voice to tell the pubs to shut-it, and the teeming masses to disperse in their separate ways, the better to elude the coronavirus infection eager to leap from one to the other and others again in exponential numbers until untold harm is done. Italy stands in warning.

An unlikely skein of geese flies two or three hundred feet over the street, at ten o’clock tonight, heading north-maybe-east, kind of mysteriously given the naturalness of their winged susurration and the builded unnaturalness of the terrain. Yet the geese are reassuring in this unusual quiet.

There they are, free maybe on their way to a mass gathering at Montrose Bay, I remember, but then isn’t that what they do in late October, squadrons of them teaming up for the winter flight South? I don’t know, but they’re doing what they do even though it’s March. Here we are stuck down below, airlines cancelling flights, laying off staff, people’s holidays abandoned, currencies plunging, governments making extravagant promises, caught, as it were, with their plans down. It was supposed to be a good time.

The caged bird sings

with fearful trill

of the things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom

We are in a trap, and Maya Angelou puts it nicely. The free bird thinks of another breeze / and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of his dreams

his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing

And, of course, he sings of freedom, as she said before. A bit dramatic in this context; but the strangely comforting overhead passage of the geese on an unnatural Friday night maybe calls for a bit of exaggeration, hyperbole in its proper place, even in someone else's eloquence. A passage of poetry, indeed, and a passage of time we are told we must serve until this thing passes.

They also serve who only stand and wait, of course, says Milton in worse circumstance, of his own blindness. Things aren't bad really, not yet anyway, but there is uneasiness in the air.