vulture

It's just a matter of time,
he knows, hours, not days,
perhaps minutes and he'll be gone.

The others are gathering around him.
He's heard of this, though he's never participated himself --
the times when one of their own goes
and the ones left do what they were born to do.
They say it's different then,
that there's a solemnity about it, a flavor of ritual.
He can hardly bear the irony of it--the day,
Good Friday the humans call it,
when just hours before he had watched
far below him as they reenacted their version of this ritual,
hanging one of their own upon a cross
where he pretends to die,
then the others take him down
and pretend to eat him.

But this one knows his kind won't pretend,
and they may not wait until he's dead.
Even now the more aggressive ones are edging closer.
It's almost dark and he's so weak.
It's been such a long day, the longest of his life.
Only yesterday at this time he was one of the vigorous ones,
feasting on fresh meat until...
until that moment when that great beast came along,
bigger than the others
and he couldn't get enough lift and ...

Vultures. Circling, circling,
around and around.

I've had two circling around above me
for a some time now, months at least,
which is how long it's taken me to notice,
to realize, ta-da,
wake up Maggie,
someone's got something to say to you.

Turkey Vulture. Talk about having a bad name, these guys are condemned from the get-go. You wanna say something bad about someone? Call ‘em a vulture.
But seriously, who are these maligned creatures?
Well, one thing I know is that they are part of Nature’s clean-up crew, along with snails and bottom-feeders. These folks have a bad rep, but where would we be without them? How do you like it when you’re cruising down the highway on a warm summer evening and whooo-eee! road kill! Aren’t you glad that when you come by next day, it’s mostly gone? And who do you think did you that service? DOT? Possibly but more likely a buzzard.
You old buzzard.
You know--big curved beak, bald head, hunched shoulders, rounded back. Perfect description. But just like our old people don’t get no respect, neither to some whole species, creatures who have just as much right to be here as we do, and sometimes are a hellova lot more useful.
Artists pay homage to the working man and woman but by and large, those workers are not respected, much less revered. Van Morrison sings, “I’m a working man in my prime, cleaning windows,” but we know he hasn’t cleaned a window in many a moon (and it would be a stretch to say he’s in his prime).
Jimmy Buffett writes, “Because it’s my job, to be cleaning up this mess, and that’s enough reason to go for me...”and makes it sound fun and romantic to be a street cleaner, but then he goes on to say it’s his job to be standing up there in front of thousands of people raking in the dough, and we know his days as a regular working stiff are a few light years behind him.

But the truth of the matter is, cleaning windows, streets, houses, toilets, everything, is important, vitally imporant, so important, in fact, our very lives depend on it. Yes, we used to live in caves and huts and throw the bones and other refuse back into a corner and didn’t notice or ignored the stench, or moved to a new cave when it got to be too much. Like other natural beasts we left our scat where it fell when we dropped it midstep and never gave it a second thought.
Until a few millenia later when we discovered that scat was related to disease, and we learned to clean it up, keep it away from our food and the hands that prepared it, and extrapolated that is next to godliness.
So, what about the noble Vulture then? Couldn’t get much closer to God up there in that clear blue sky, now could you? And his raison d’etre is cleanliness, though he might look at it from a slightly different point of view. But he’s not proud, and he’s not above taking someone else’s leavings, another lesson we would do well to learn.
We’ve been taught that newer is better, more is better, bigger is better, until we’ve suddenly discovered there’s not enough room in our little cave for all the old stuff when we shove it out of the way to make room for the newer, more and bigger.
The Vulture doesn’t hoard, doesn’t collect, doesn’t update, upgrade, replace. He doesn’t know a thing about planned obsolescence. He’s only interested in a couple of things: making more critters like himself and more of that tasty week-old deer that he had for dinner last night.

March 15, 2004
© copyright 2004 Maggie Wilson