magpie's kiss
My mother taught me always to blow a kiss to a magpie. She would recite the famous rhyme up to seven. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told. ‘It’s terribly sexist, really,’ she often added, ‘Boys and even numbers all better than the odds – sorrow and girls, silver not as good as gold, and seven for silence.’
As I grew up, I found that most people knew of the rhyme, but instead of the kiss they would give a salute to the birds. One of my teachers said in a lesson: ‘I was always encouraged to salute a single magpie, along with the words “Good morning, Mr. Magpie, my regards to your wife.” But I didn’t know whether the magpie was male or female. So, my approach is to say, ‘Hello, Comrade Magpie, my regards to your spouse.”’
A lone magpie is traditionally an ill omen in Europe; the greeting to a mischief counteracts bad luck. Although I knew of the magpie’s reputation (‘The devil’s bird’, my mum says with affection), in my mind our magpie’s kiss was a sign of connection rather than warding off. A kiss is more intimate than a salute, after all, more conspiratorial.
To this day I always blow kisses to magpies whenever I see them. And I spot them everywhere. Years ago, when I was sitting quiet in my room, a magpie flew straight at the window and knocked a snail’s shell against the glass with one sharp rap. Just the other day, I walked down an avenue flanked by rowan trees tasselled with bright berries, magpies weaving across the path.
Magpies punctuate my surroundings. They tell me to notice the things around me and write them down, with their plumage partly white as a blank page and partly black as the ink that arcs across it.
Magpies distinctive yin-yang pattern marks them out from the other birds I see in my urban environment. Most of the black and white birds I know of – like oyster catchers, puffins, black guillemots, or penguins – often live on edges or liminal places: shore, cliffs, Antarctica. Magpies strut along the pavement and in the park by my flat, Beau Brummel birds. Black and white except for an aurora borealis sheen on their wings and tail feathers, nabbed from the peacock.
Raised Catholic, I was familiar with nativity scenes from a young age, be they cardboard pop-up illustrations, cheap plastic sculptures amongst the straw at church, or gold-framed paint on canvas. I know the tenderness of the farm animals as they gaze upon the Christ child, the self-contained Virgin Marys, the weatherworn Josephs, the choirs of angels, the Shepherds and Wise Men approaching with awe and foreshadowing gifts. There is a magpie in Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca’s depiction, now in London’s National Gallery. It perches on the edge of the ruinous barn roof, rightward looking in perfect cut-out profile.
Some have interpreted the magpie as another sign of Christ’s future suffering. Others have suggested the artist chose to depict stillness in a bird famous for its chattering cry (with its onomatopoeic Latin name pica pica) to convey the momentousness of the occasion, when all of nature marks a saviour’s birth. This idea suits the signature marmoreal quality of Piero’s figures. Perhaps once it has shaken itself from wonderment and recovered its eloquence, the magpie will spread the same tidings as the angels.
In the painting, the magpie is doing what magpies seem to do best. Observe. All birds appear knowing to me. Perhaps this is due to their sideways looks or simply because they are creatures of the air. Yet magpies and corvids more generally are particularly astute. They are like humans, at least in cultural representations: clever, acquisitive, gossipy, mischievous.
In Britain nowadays, I think we are fond of magpies despite or even because of their supposed devilish qualities. They are friendly enough to have been given a common name: Maggie Pie alongside Jenny Wren and Robin Red-breast. We enact the rhyme and the greetings, the kisses and salutes, because they are continuities of observance that connect us with the past, and each other.
This fondness is displayed in season three of the gentle comic BBC series The Detectorists, which I recently binge-watched on a sick day. It follows the charmingly bathetic exploits of a group of local history enthusiasts in Essex, metal detectorists hoping to discover a hoard of gold or a Saxon king’s ship burial. One of the characters describes the group as ‘time travellers’ who ‘unearth the scattered memories’.
Playing on the widespread belief in their attraction to shiny objects, scenes show magpies lining their nest with the old gold their human counterparts long to find, and always narrowly miss. An evocative sequence at the end of the opening episode has the magpies as witnesses to the layers of time accumulated within one green field, and what has transpired there: burials, lovers a-walking, ploughing, the detectorists heading to the pub. ‘Magpie’ by the folk band The Unthanks plays, with the lyrics:
Oh, the magpie brings us tidings
Of news both fair and foul
She's more cunning than the raven
More wise than any owl
For she brings us news of the harvest
Of the barley, wheat, and corn
And she knows when we'll go to our graves
And how we shall be born
How many kisses have the magpies added to their hoards? How many salutes have they acknowledged? What have they seen? What messages will they bring?
if you want more to read
I found this conversation from 2018 really interesting: Women Translating the Classics: An Interview with Emily Wilson, Sholeh Wolpé, and Arshia Sattar. I’m currently reading Wolpé’s translation of twelfth century Sufi poet Attar’s The Conference of the Birds and look forward to Wilson’s interpretation of the Iliad.
SW: I did what no one, to my knowledge, has ever done before in translating classical literature. I followed the absence of gender in Persian nouns and pronouns! The Divine, Simorgh, the Hoopoe, the Wayfarers, and all the birds are not necessarily male or female. In Persian, we do not have “he” or “she,” “his” or “hers.” This masterpiece is about our souls and the human soul is genderless. I respected that in my translation.
My sister sent me this article, on the vital question: When Is a Bird a ‘Birb’? by Asher Elbein:
Given this, the rounder or fluffier a bird is, the more birblike it is likely to be. Here again, classic songbirds and rotund groundbirds like grouse and ptarmigans have the advantage: They look like little balls of fluff, an important component for birbness. Most hawks and eagles are too sharp and angular to qualify under this metric; the same goes for many gulls, cranes, crows, and grackles. If the Pileated Woodpecker didn't lose its birb status under Rule 1, it does now, though smaller and rounder woodpeckers like the Downy or Red-bellied are most certainly birbs.