The everyday ordinary pigeon frequently flying over our heads, along roadside travels, or perched on the roofs of neighborhood barns and buildings, is actually classified as a rock dove. It is named for nesting and perching on rocky ledges, and under bridges and outcroppings. Not native to this country, it is a descendant of birds brought to Nova Scotia by the French in the early 17th century. In all this time, they have proliferated far and wide into residential farm country and, more noticeably, into cities, public squares especially, where the frequent refuse of messy habits has devalued their presence in the eyes of metropolitan bird watchers. There now on ledges of skyscrapers, pairs of nesting peregrine falcons are a welcomed predation to limit pigeon proliferation.

Early American avian history of proliferation also goes back to the tragic tale of extinction of the native passenger pigeon. It was perceived in unlimited abundance by John James Audubon, who described flocks that stretched for miles, passing overhead in the sky. He estimated that such a flock contained over a billion birds. We had to later learn a hard lesson of the ultimate environmental peril of perceived over abundance.

Replacement reproduction of such large numbers is usually a slower recovery process by comparison, especially for the pigeon. A nesting pair is limited to two eggs at a time, and chicks raised slowly are painstakingly fed by parents with a regurgitated white fluid mixture of grain and water known as “pigeon milk,” as in my illustration.

Rock dove squabs (common pigeons under 4 weeks old) have historically been raised for many human purposes, particularly as carrier pigeons with a heroic purpose in wartime. It was possible to relay a written message on light paper inserted into a small tube tied to one leg.

Early Romans are said to have sent reports of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul back to Rome via pigeon, and news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo back to England as well. In the two World Wars, carriers on the frontlines were decorated with the English Dickin medal, the highest honor given to an animal in service during wartime, and the French Croix de guerre for saving human lives with their homing instincts. They also played a vital role in the in the invasion of Normandy as radio messages were apt to be intercepted by the enemy.

How this life saving homing instinct is inherent in their brains is explained in recent National Geodetic research. It discovered pigeons could detect low frequency infrasound waves from magnetic earth fields with the help of iron particles above their bills. It was an instinct known as “olfactory navigation.” This confirms that wild creatures often have different, and some superior, abilities to humans.

The sport of flying homing pigeons is 3,000 years old and still popular with groups called pigeon fanciers.

White pigeons are still used in dove-releasing ceremonies at weddings, funerals, and some sporting events. This pigeon species has had a historic diversity since almost day one with the Biblical tale of a dove homing to Noah’s arc with a laurel branch in its mouth. It conveyed symbolic promise of earthly recovery of dry land for all creatures. This symbol of promise and hope still lives on for us to this very day. May it have a meaning that the cycle planetary momentum of Earth may be able to recover from global warming with our help.

By George B. Emmons

Poets and painters, poets and photographers, poets and moviemakers – poets and all manners of visual arts – were paired, studied, and understood more fully when Dr. Josephine Yu gave an insightful and inspiring presentation titled “Sister Acts: A Discussion of Poetry and Paintings” on October 19 at the Mattapoisett Public Library.

Yu, a professor at Keiser University in Fort Lauderdale, earned her BA and MFA at Georgia State University before moving to Florida to pursue her PhD at Florida State University. Her awards span such notable achievements as 2016 winner of the Judge’s Prize Elixir Press Poetry Award, 2008 Best New Poets Award, 2013 Ploughshares Emerging Writer Contest, and three times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, to name a few.

Yu’s style of public speaking and subject matter is a mixture of warmth, humor, empathy, anger, forgiveness, and nearly all other varieties of human emotion coupled with a deep appreciation and understanding of art in general.

Picking both well-known works of art as well as other artistic forms such as photography and film, Yu asked the audience to go deeper into the visual works through the words of poets.

She carried the participants down the road where cognition and emotion cross paths, thus generating a fuller sense of being present with the artists.

For the 16^thCentury painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Yu examined the poem “Muséedes Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden. She directed the attention of the attendees to how small and insignificant Icarus appeared in the lower right corner of the canvas, a mere antidote to the larger theme of “life goes on.” Auden wrote of the much larger farmer in the center of the frame, “but for him it was not an important failure.” The mistakes of youth and ambition pale against a larger canvass of decades of living where success and failure are inevitable.

Yu also focused on abstract art in the form of Michael Goldberg’s “Sardines” against the poem of Frank O’Hara, “Why I am Not a Painter.”

“This is a story of the process,” said Yu, for both painting and writing, and how one can influence the other, while maintaining creative independence, and also how “art may look spontaneous,” but is really carefully crafted.

Later in her presentation, she discussed Poet Laureate Natasha Tretheway’s book Bellocq’s Ophelia, reading three separate pieces that explored race, power, a woman’s role in society, strength, and fragility.

The presentation was a tour de force in bringing visual arts and poetic passages into a deeper context and the extent to which humans attempt to express themselves –to reach out and touch one another.

On Saturday, October 20, Yu read her own works from her book Prayer Book of the Anxious, published by Elixir Press.

The voice of the writer is never more expressive and vulnerable then when reading his or her own words, and that sensitivity and courage was on full display.

Yu’s writing brings the reader into the fullness of human experience from the profound to the sublime and everything in between. In her poem Ocean, it begins with an October coastline; as a first-time visitor to Mattapoisett, Yu thought this selected piece apropos. Her voice seemed to rise and descend on ocean currents, “I experiment with the lives I invent…maybe hiding myself.”

In other works, her Catholic upbringing and her mother’s devout faith were given a presence as Yu referenced saints and their religious attributes to drive home emotions of anger, loss, and forgiveness.

“I’m interested in how we use stories to heal us through myth and fable,” Yu said.

Yu is a very generous writer, introducing selections from other writers she thought the audience might enjoy, including one from Marion poet Elizabeth Farrell.

Yu said in closing, “There is no greater wish I could have than to have my book be appreciated.”

Copies of Yu’s latest book are available at the Mattapoisett Public Library and for sale online on book buying websites.

By Marilou Newell