The Owl's Cry

 Driving across the country today, I decided to halt my journey in Cleveland, figuring that was a good half-way point between my family in Rhode Island and my destination in Iowa. As I hit the corner of Pennsylvania that one passes through on I-90, I started to see warnings about a high wind. By the time I got to Ohio, leaves and sticks were blowing across the highway. And in Cleveland itself, a runny sleet started battering down on me. I decided I had made the right choice to cut the drive in half, and pulled into my hotel for the night outside the city. 

I finally glanced at my phone at this point, and saw that I'd missed a text from my mother earlier in the day saying I should call her to talk about the weather on my drive. I did so now, and this was the first I had heard that the Midwest and especially Iowa—my destination—was in the midst of an epic snow storm. Whatever I had driven through in Cleveland was just the outer edge of this same complex. And the next few days were not expected to be better. The snow itself was going to die down; but it is to be replaced by life-threatening cold temperatures. I felt very grateful in that moment for my warm hotel room. 

Then I read in the news that the governor of Texas is right now putting asylum seekers on buses and sending them to Chicago in the middle of this historic freeze—many of them "without coats, without shoes to protect them from the snow," in the words of Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker. And it was borne in on me that not everyone has a warm hotel to go into in the midst of this storm. I thought of all the poor and homeless—citizen, resident, or otherwise—who have no shelter in this cold. I thought of the asylum seekers—the world's "homeless, tempest-tost"—arriving in Chicago in a blizzard. 

And I was reminded of a poem I had just read in a small collection of Edward Thomas's poems that I had picked up while traveling in London. Thomas, one of the great war poets (though most of his verses are more concerned with the countryside than the war in which he untimely perished), describes a night of bitter cold, and the relief he felt when he turned into a tavern and felt its warmth. Then he hears the chill note of an owl outside, and it reminds him of all who have no tavern to retreat into that night; all who will spend that same cold night outside. 

No merry note, nor cause of merriment, was the owl's cry—he writes,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went. 

And salted was my food, and my repose, 

Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.