by Greg Rappleye

Throw your voice!

Amaze your friends!

                             -1950’s comic book advertisement

 

Bought in a Saco junk shop and recalled from Captain Marvel, it’s a tin loop, 

a shattered whelk—beveled by waves so as not to cut—by which I once believed 

a voice might be thrown at all bodies, living and dead. Sugared in whiskey, against 

my wintered lips, it throws no voice; merely renders a flutter, a trill, a whirred falsetto 

song. Listen. St. Stephen’s Feast. The Wren Parade.  A scatter of snow across herring-boned bricks. The wren-boys mill in straw hats and reedy suits. The captain shouts, 

a din rises. A canvas horse, rushes tacked along its canvas flanks, is made to gallop 

by a boy’s pumping arms, giving chase, or seeming-so, as the wren-boys, their captain, 

the cacophonous tangles of snare drums and penny whistles, of trombones and bodhráns, begin to unspool; from a jumbled knot to a ragged marching column. At its lead, besieged by revelers—a felt wren, so-sung King-of-all-Birds, is hung from a stripling ash, dead  to all, his high-stick ribboned in Gaelic green, in orange, the wren’s body dangled in mistletoe, in blood-berried holly, rising above a flag of Mayo, the flags of Connacht, eight flags of a golden harp rampant in a field of green; so many flags of the left-behind provinces. We sang from lyrics scattered among us—I have a little box under my arm / a tuppence or penny will do it no harm—the wren-boys, their feigned surliness, drowning out the beggared words and lost with them, my best try at a wren’s true voice, tossing a rush-and-tumble song where I alone thought to throw it—across the rye grass, curling through dulse and knapweed, warbled across a swale on Oak Street, echoed against the three-story tenement where my grandfather fried pogies and coughed a turburcular cough; tracking his rent in a green notebook, each entry an epitaph, made in a spidery blue script. And no one heard the true song. What is a true song, warbled at sow thistle, whispered from trailing arbutus, from coltsfoot, when a great parade is loudly passing?  We sang without thought, not yet amazed, missing a little point (there may have been others), of how the wren—its throaty squeals, its assault of cuffy scolds—saved Stephen from the Norse, luring them far from a hidden saint and across a darkling bog, until the desperate bird fell and was killed for its kindness, pummeled and hung above a great fire—broken-winged, blooded, trussed and bound—the King-of-all-Birds, set aflame; dangled from the Tree-of-Heaven. Will you not toss a penny, we sang, to buy this king a grave?