Mark this for a mercy; that here
birds, even here, sustain
the wide and impossible highways
of warm current, divide the sky;
mark this- they all day have
amazed the air, that it falls apart
from their heavy wings in thin wedges
of sound; though the dull black earth
is very still, sweating
a special sourness
they make high over the hard thorn-trees
their own magnificent turning,
they chain all together
with very slow journeys to and fro
the limits of the dead place;
smelling anything old and no longer quick.
Even, here though the rough ground
offers no kindness to the eye
nor the rusting engines could not ever
have intended an excellence of motion
and the stones have fallen in strange attitudes
and the boxes full of dried stain papers
above the harsh barrows of land and metal
great birds pursue a vigilant silence
The ceremony of their soaring
have made a new and difficult solace
there is no dead place or dying so terrible
but weaves above it surely, breaking
the fragile air with beauty of its coming,
a comfort as of crows…
A poem like ‘A Comfort of Crows’ is not what Dennis Scott is best known for, yet it is not alien to those common characteristics of poetry and theatre that have made him one of the most outstanding poet-dramatists of the Caribbean. Dennis Scott (1939-1991) of Jamaica, is foremost in the region’s literature for the quality of his work, but also very importantly for its