Monday Blues: Blue Jay

 Yeats frequently wrote about death. The Irish Great Famine was twenty years in the past by the time of his birth, though still fresh in the memory of those who survived. Deaths during various uprisings and, ultimately, the executions that resulted in response the the Easter Rising and subsequent war for independence would have exerted a heavy influence, providing inspiration for his words.

"Although crowds gathered once if she but showed her face,
And even old men's eyes grew dim, this hand alone,
Like some last courtier at a gypsy camping-place
Babbling of fallen majesty, records what's gone.
The lineaments, a heart that laughter has made sweet,
These, these remain, but I record what's gone. A crowd
Will gather, and not know it walks the very street
Whereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud."

(Yeats, W. B.: Fallen Majesty)

The more you ride, roads, trails, overlooked spaces on the margins of our cities the more likely you are to come across road kill and trail casualties; furry creatures of all kinds, mostly small (though once there was a coyote), snakes, lizards, frogs, and birds. I have come across deer legs, and squirrel tails, as well as skulls and bones of undetermined origin. Most of them pass behind our furiously spinning wheels with little though, once, there was a little sparrow at the Pomona College Farm that I though should be memorialized with a blog post. 

This little scrub jay (I believe), I noticed on the bike lane along Via Real, in Carpinteria over the weekend. Who knows how it met its end, though its location along the road may suggest a possibility. Is its life somehow less than that of a human, is it somehow not equal because of the difference? Who is to say one life is more, or less valuable than another? And so I will let the words of William Buttler Yeats memorialize this one small life.

The Monday Blues has been an occasional feature here at the blog since inception; the blues, an emotion, a color, a genre of music, with a cycling twist.