I suppose I first started paying attention to the crows in January 2019.

We were having so much rain in San Francisco, it rained for days and days and it was so cold. I was living in a tiny studio apartment with no windows and when it rained I would leave the backdoor open so I could listen to the raindrops. I was surprised by how often I heard the crows, cawing or clucking.

Since it was so cold that month, I often wore a big scarf and my camel-colored coat, a hand-me-down from my friend Sophia. I brought that coat along with me to Norwich and Paris, so whenever it’s cold enough to wear it I feel transported to a different place, a colder and older place.

But anyway, the birds.

So in January 2019, inspired by the rainy weather, my trusty coat, and the sounds of the birds I wrote my Crow Poem (Croem). You can read it here! The poem didn’t come out this way originally, I did a lot of different drafts. I added a few stanzas and cut some back, then decided I wanted my poem to have 13 parts, a reference to Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Blackbird (as a creative writing student this poem is really hammered into your brain, so it’s almost a little joke to reference it). I started by writing about the crows…but then I found myself writing about the hawks I’d seen around, and how special it feels to see them.

So in January 2019 I started scratching out this poem, it was probably a rainy Monday morning. The next week the sun was out in San Francisco again. After all that rain and rain. So I open the backdoor to let some sun in, I step out onto the back step and I look up into the neighbors’ pine tree that hung over the fence into our little yard. Peering down at me from one of the lower branches, so close is a HAWK!!! Watching me!

I stood there, wordless, watching the hawk till he felt too watched and flew off. I felt struck by lightning! I felt like I had conjured the hawk myself! With my dang poetry! It was a gift from the heavens saying, “Go on, keep writing.”

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