"Tower of Silence" by James Frederick William Rowe

Tower of Silence

James Frederick William Rowe

Scavenger,

Pluck the meat

With your gore-fleckt beak

Strip the flesh

Strip by strip

And make a feast 

Of my innards

I have need of the denudation

Of my bones

For only when my skeleton

Is in sight of the sun

Shall my soul be free to soar

Then the heights which you fly

With fingered wings outstretched as if

To grasp the winds 

Shall seem as mere hoverings

Compared to my empyrean heights

How else am I to reach heaven

If not by the winged climb

Of my soul? 

Poet’s Notes:  Tower of Silence is my take on the Zoroastrian practice of sky burial, where the dead are placed atop towers that their flesh might be stripped by scavengers. After reading a particularly fascinating article about the vulture in National Geographic, I've taken a certain liking of this creature and, paired to my pre-existing interest in Zoroastrianism, I thought to write something that spoke of them in a positive light.

I was inspired by the fact that the Parsi actually have to keep vultures on hand in order to denude the bones properly, given the vast decline in the number of vultures owing to environmental degradation and other measures. If they don't keep the birds on hand, the bodies can take weeks upon weeks to be stripped bare, when previously they'd be nothing but a skeleton in a matter of hours or a day.

Refs:   http://www.npr.org/2012/09/05/160401322/vanishing-vultures-a-grave-matter-for-indias-parsis

            http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/01/vultures-endangered-scavengers/