A Close Reading of Rita Banerjee's poem "Birds on Blue"
In which I talk about jazz and nuclear weapons and birds. I also play around with footnotes. I don't know. Things are weird right now.
Hi. No doubt you’ve noticed that things are not great right now in a lot of ways, and I hope you’ve been heeding the exhortations from very smart people to call your senators and representatives and urge them to stand up for democracy and push back against the incredible overreaches and unthinkable maneuverings of non-elected people. If you haven’t done it yet, please make time to call. Even if your congresspeople agree with you and are already doing the right things — tell them to keep doing those things! — but especially if your congresspeople are doing nothing, or worse, aiding and abetting the anticonstitutional actions underway. You can find the contact info for both senators and representatives at this website. Be persistent and be clear and be kind to the interns who answer the phone.
And when you’ve done that vital work, you’re going to need something to feed your soul. Something that will make no sense to the destroyers. Something that elevates the innate mystery and majesty of the human being.
You will need poetry.
Fortunately, I’ve got you covered. Rita Banerjee and Amanda Shaw will be reading for What The Universe Is: A (Virtual) Reading Series on Tuesday, February 11 at 7:30pm Eastern. This will be happening on Zoom, so you can tune in from anywhere.
All you need to do is register at bit.ly/WTUIFeb2025 to get your Zoom link and then tune in at the appointed time.
And now, without further ado, let’s give a close reading to Rita Banerjee’s poem “Birds on Blue,” which first appeared in Queen Mob’s Teahouse:
Birds on Blue “Is it not sweet to think that, if only you have patience, all that has ever been will come back to you?” —Isak Dinesen If liberty were jazz, she’d be waiting like a crow, keeping crown on ebony wings, mapping out America over ocean. Crow found jazz on an island atoll, she was praying for China Blue when it blasted— Crow’s heart needs a container, innocence a hearth, and Little Boy a beat. Little Boy runs around hen-pen waiting to crow like a rooster with his head cut Crow-bird sallies, keeps the mood Rooster’s a hand-grenade, Crow’s trumpet cool, blue words contain her, Not Rooster, he’s searching for a way to speech— だまれ ! ! He’s up then collapses on little crow feet. On fine dark wings, Crow-bird rehearses, lets her voice run vertical over men, over fire, over sea, when her song finally reaches America, it thumps a sky glazed porcelain
Where to begin with a poem like this? On the first few read-throughs I struggled for a way in, though there was always a sense of something moving under the surface that made me want to keep trying. Certainly there are what I might call hook-words, like “liberty” and “jazz,” that primed me for wanting to engage with it further — signifiers, in a sense, that this poem is going to be considering complex ideas that have multivalent meanings.
So before I dove back into it again, I took a little break to listen to some jazz. What felt right in the moment was Dexter Gordon’s 1963 record Our Man In Paris, given the particularities of the record: with the exception of the bass player, all of the musicians were American ex-pats living in Europe at the time, and because of Bud Powell’s eccentricities, it’s a set not of originals, but of standards being worked through by this ensemble. If you don’t know it and want to check it out, here’s a link.
And so, with my brain re-set1, I returned to the poem, which opens with an epigraph from Isak Dinesen, perhaps best-known in the English-speaking world as the author of Out of Africa. In actuality, Dinesen was the pen name of the Danish writer Karen Blixen. If you only just learned that, don’t feel bad. You’re only a few minutes behind me. (I’ve never read Out of Africa. I saw the film years ago, but it didn’t stick with me.)
Blixen’s life aside, I’m intrigued by the tone this epigraph sets; it’s not assuring us that anything we wait for will return to us — it’s saying that it’s sweet to think it might, which is another thing entirely. It’s about possibilities, not promises.
That tone of possibility is an important one to keep in mind, especially with the poem starting on a conditional note: “If liberty were jazz, she’d be waiting” (emphasis mine) slips us into the world of hypotheticals, which means that liberty may not be jazz, may not be waiting. But the poem asks us to consider it, and now we need to figure out what that means in this context:
If liberty were jazz, she’d be waiting like a crow, keeping crown on ebony wings, mapping out America over ocean.
Being, as I’ve mentioned before, an American since birth, the imagery in this stanza suggests to me the Statue of Liberty (the crown, the references to America and to jazz, which is one of America’s great cultural legacies), but here envisioned as being “like a crow” — which is to say, highly intelligent and curious, and with more than a little resonance to the raven first sent forth from Noah’s Ark to find dry land2, especially as it flies forth to map “America over ocean.”
And so we follow Crow into the second stanza:
Crow found jazz on an island atoll, she was praying for China Blue when it blasted—
This poem is, I think, accreting meaning through associative leaps; the “island atoll” suggests to me places like Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where the United States conducted 23 nuclear weapons tests in the years following World War II, after forcibly relocating the indigenous population. This association is reinforced by the double meaning of the word “blasted,” as it can be interpreted to be the jazz blasting, but also could be read as a reference to the nuclear explosions inflicted on the atolls of the Pacific3.
But what to make of China Blue? It is not, so far as I’ve been able to tell, the code name for any nuclear test, but it is an older name for what is now called Han blue, a chemical compound that creates a blue pigment used to signify wealth due to the expense of creating it. Of course, “blue” is also an important concept in jazz; a blued note is one that is sung or played slightly out of standard pitch, which adds another potential layer of meaning.
Crow’s heart needs a container, innocence a hearth, and Little Boy a beat.
This stanza continues to play with the slipperiness of connotative meanings in English; we start it with Crow’s heart and close with the word “beat,” suggesting a link between Crow and the newly introduced “Little Boy” — another reference, perhaps, to nuclear weaponry, given that “Little Boy” was used as the name of a type of nuclear bomb (including the first one dropped in war, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.) The “beat,” however, could also be read in keeping with the musical references that are also peppered throughout the poem, and it could also be understood as needing a purpose,
Little Boy runs around hen-pen waiting to crow like a rooster with his head cut
And it certainly seems in this stanza as though Little Boy desperately needs that purposeful beat as he is running “hen-pen” — a delightful phrasing that carries forward the bird themes established in the title. Indeed, the language in this stanza builds more on those themes, allowing us the image of the proverbial headless chicken running amok.
Crow-bird sallies, keeps the mood Rooster’s a hand-grenade, Crow’s trumpet cool, blue words contain her,
Back into the language of jazz, we have Crow-bird engaged now with Rooster, where Crow “keeps the mood” with her “trumpet cool,” while “Rooster’s a hand-grenade” — there’s dynamic tension between these two approaches, and I find myself thinking of the way Clifford Brown and Max Roach played off of each other on this 1955 recording of “The Blues Walk.”
Not Rooster, he’s searching for a way to speech— だまれ ! ! He’s up then collapses on little crow feet.
Rooster’s “searching / for a way to speech—” and then told to “Shut up!!” in Japanese, which causes him to collapse “on little crow feet.” The tension in the previous stanza has come to a head — the hand-grenade has detonated, “blasted” like the jazz (or the nuke) in the second stanza — and Rooster is down.
On fine dark wings, Crow-bird rehearses, lets her voice run vertical over men, over fire, over sea, when her song finally reaches America, it thumps a sky glazed porcelain
Crow is still somewhere other than America, but raising her voice — I love the description that she “lets her voice run vertical // over men, over fire, over sea,” even though crows are not known for having the most melodic voices among birds. But her voice has tremendous power, rising over three things that re-make the earth (and which, again, could be read as references to Cold War nuclear testing. And “her song finally reaches America” — where the poem began, where jazz began, where nuclear threats began — and “thumps a sky glazed porcelain” in a mysterious but arresting final image.
This poem. I’ve read it a dozen times, maybe more, and I’m not sure I’m any closer to really understanding it, to being able to trace the delicate threads of bird and jazz and maybe Cold War realpolitik and nuclear fear woven into it. But it’s beautiful, rich in sound and image, suggestive and complex. I would absolutely love to hear your take on this poem, and I would love to have you join Rita Banerjee, Amanda Shaw, and me at What The Universe Is on Tuesday, February 11 at 7:30pm Eastern on Zoom. Register at bit.ly/WTUIFeb2025!
Note: This jazz re-set may not work for you. You may need something different, and that is perfectly fine! Mostly I just recommend stepping away, giving your mind a break, and then returning to see what you might experience differently. This also works for writing, too. Probably also for other things. Just maybe not cooking.
As you may know, crows and ravens are closely related but distinct species; they share a formidable intelligence and an eternally hip all-black wardrobe. What you don’t know is that my theory about the reason the raven didn’t return to the Ark was that it found dry land and thought to itself “Thank goodness I’m finally off that ship of fools. At least here I can find some peace and quiet.” Alas, the dove ruined all that.
It should be noted here that the United States was not the only nuclear nation to conduct weapons tests in the Pacific; France also inflicted such damages on its own Polynesian territories, and the United Kingdom did as well. The worldwide legacy of nuclear weapons testing is, I suspect, far more extensive than many people — especially those who may not have grown up during the Cold War — realize.