GHG Studio - Buzzard's Mending Kit

Buzzard's Mending Kit

Adaptation of Giotto's Massacre of the Innocents, Basilica of St. Francis, Assisi

     One morning, heavy with the pain of world news, I walked my dog up to Mt. Bonnell, a city park that overlooks Lake Austin. Sitting there, looking to the north, the river was quiet save for one ski boat zippering up the middle. The landscape would have been perfect if not for the multitude of McMansions popping up in the hills and along the lakeshore. The school shooting in Colorado was to the west of me, the heightened battles in Kosovo were to the east. God knows what genocides of children were occurring to the north and south.
     The massacre of the innocents, Herod's rampage to find baby Jesus, isn’t the first genocide in the Bible. This gruesome tale is often left out of the Christmas story, but there it sticks, right between the wise men and the flight into Egypt. Giotto included it in his fresco series in the Basilica of St. Francis. Not long before my sulking on Mt. Bonnell, an earthquake had struck Italy, killing villagers in Assisi and badly damaging the church and its art. The image of the broken basilica hurt too.
     In my blue funk, I noticed the persistent flight of a buzzard. Seeking death and decay, it took its own time, slowly gliding from one side of the panorama to the other. Back and forth it went, over and over. It seemed to smooth the landscape ...as if mending the world. Mending the pain, the brokenness, the annoying culture wars, the church, everything. The buzzard soared indiscriminately, and it created holy space. I smiled, amused that such a disgusting bird would be the carrier of beauty and reconciliation.
     So I did some research on buzzards. The varieties we normally see in Texas have the fancier name of "turkey vultures". They and their relatives have some very nasty habits besides their greedy feasting on road kill. They urinate on their legs to cool themselves off. The adult birds have rubbery red heads sans feathers so they can jam their slick head up the rectum of a dead animal and eat the entrails from the inside out. No wonder these birds made the abomination hit list in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. As cormorants, they figure into Milton's Paradise Lost, perched ominously in the Tree of Life. With such edifying knowledge, it is a bigger wonder that we can be blessed by observing their gloriously lazy dihedral soaring.
     Dostoevsky (and later Solzhenitsyn) said, "Beauty will save the world." At face value, that statement is absurd and sentimental. But watching buzzards on a painful morning, I sensed some truth in it. The reality was bleak. Beauty broke into it and revealed transcendence. My woefully limited understanding cannot grasp the meaning of that, but somewhere in this ripped-up world, hope had won.

Buzzard's Mending Kit

	The picture was perfect

until the left side went berserk and shot up a school,
		and the right boiled over into a cleansing war

	and down the center the landscape ripped from the pain of a river dammed with children sliced by a skier's stunts.


You float into the picture,		pour out your tracing pattern

above it all		and through it all

	you weave slow mends	from east


to west

	touching north,

	entering south,

	hovering over the waters,

	mirroring the coils that now lap the glossy lakeside homes.


You persist in your panorama,		stitching wide mercy loops

	into the fray.


Who am I to say you are an abomination, you with your raw red head thrust into stench? You death-sucker, goading a pecking order at God’s banquet, guarding your greed high up in the Tree of Life like Herod on his balcony, his rank breath drooling in yellow spirals, a noose over a wretched feast.

Innocence hits the floor like a box of pins,

and in you glide	from heavens rent with stars of martyrs.

You, with your exceptional nostrils and eyes, find the shattered faces in cracked cathedrals. Then you return to
	the common ground up in the air

	where your patterns are stored.

We know two things when the hot current comes—
	You will be lifted into beauty,
a beauty that signals death,


	And we will use it to mend our own private Guernicas.

	For there is no way around it:

	Your blue flight is glorious.
The grace of your pursuit for this heaving world—

		it transcends you.

"When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:

          voice was heard in Ramah,
               wailing and loud lamentation,
          Rachel weeping for her children;
               She refused to be consoled,
                    Because they are no more."

(Matthew 2: 16-18/ Jeremiah 31:15)

"Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!"

(Psalm 137:9)

"...And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

(Genesis 1:2)

“These you shall regard as detestable among the birds. They shall not be eaten; they are an abomination: the eagle, the vulture, the osprey, the buzzard, the kite of any kind; every raven of any kind; the ostrich, the nighthawk, the sea gull, the hawk of any kind; the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, the water hen, the desert owl, the carrion vulture, the stork, the heron of any kind, the hoopoe, and the bat.”

(Leviticus 11:13-19)

"...a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;"

(Ecclesiastes 3:7)

"...rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing."

(Joel 2:13)

“You have caused the land to quake; you have torn it open; repair the cracks in it, for it is tottering.”

(Psalm 60:2)

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence…”

(Isaiah 64:1)