Letter Boxed July 22, 2023 Answers

CORMORANT THANKFUL also.
Grateful to get a shag.

OUR RAVEN OF THE SEA

Her wings shone dark as midnight
Her eggs so chalky blue,
‘Black feet splayed’ akimbo,(1)
Away to fish she flew.

After a dive, she skims the waves
And with oinking cry
Her plumage black and wet with brine,
She spreads her wings to dry.

Her cousin with the spectacles
Extinct as gone can be,
So we’re thankful for the bounty now
In nesting colonies.

But double-crested ones, once rare,
(Poisoned by DDT)
Are now again so plentiful,
We’re on a killing spree. (3)

So goes the so-called argument
“They eat our precious trout,”
But ‘ours’ should fill us with (at least)
A modicum of doubt.

The fish do not belong to us
Nor do the cormorants;
A fight between the two of them
Is part of nature’s dance.

The cormorants are even there
In Greek mythology:
As Hermes flew to Calypso’s isle
In Homer’s Odyssey. (4)

So ‘cross many millennia
In life and poetry,
We’re thankful for the cormorant,
Our raven of the sea. (5)

1. Amy Clampitt, “The Cormorant in its Element”
2. The spectacled cormorant, indigenous to the Bering Sea, extinct likely sometime in the 1800s.
3. (Many articles online.)
4. “He stepped out of the ether onto the Pieran coast then swooped over the sea, skimming the waves like a cormorant . . . “The Odyssey, book 5
5. Cormorant: from Medieval Latin corvus marinus, meaning ‘sea raven’

Also LockrUm, alternate spelling, equally obscure. Some kind of linen, apparently. OA takes the prize today for TI.