Trust you to be persnickety!
However, I did have something specific to go on. Our women's writing group
regularly visits a cottage on the Cumbrian moors, taking food and wine to
share, doing lots of writing, lots of walking (yes, even me), lots of
laughing. This is in a tiny village called Ravenstonedale, which we were
told got its name from the stone that marked the neighbourhood gibbet.
Crows, ravens, rooks -- I can't tell 'tother from which. Except that there
was a boy my father taught, who said that if you see one rook by itself it's
a crow, and if you see a lot of crows together they're rooks.
joanna
> Nice!!!
>
> Robin
>
> (Though to be strictly accurate, the ravens weren't gibbet birds --
> corbies
> were.
>
> "There wir three corbies sittin on a wa ... " )
>
> Johnnie Armstrong
>
> (Some of my Best Friends were ravens, and you never mistook them for
> ravens.)
>
> Jus' a thot.
>
> :-)
>
> Ane Corbie.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Joanna Boulter" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2005 6:08 PM
> Subject: snap
>
>
>> Poetry Seeks Radiance
>> (on a line misheard at a lecture)
>>
>> Poetry seeks ravens
>> I thought he said,
>> catching a dark feather
>> from the gibbet birds,
>> their proof of poetry's
>> keen eye and murderous
>> merciless beak.
>>
>> The only radiance here
>> is the shining bones
>> pecked clean, the purest
>> possible form. If this
>> is tumbled in its chains
>> we must reassemble
>> it with unflinching hands.
>>
>>
>> Joanna Boulter
>> Darlington UK
>>
>
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