THE RABBIT AND THE MARTLET
DORA WESTWOOD FLOOD
Brer Rabbit and an owl
Every evening the owl and the white rabbit looked up and watched a set grey wings circle above them.
Almost orange in the sunset.
“It’s as if I don’t know her.”
The rabbit said to the owl.
“I see her everyday, but I’ve never met her.”
The owl replied by staring with his large, round eyes.
And joined the bird with a flap of his wings.
The next day the owl didn’t appear for their evening walk,
So the rabbit set off alone.
And like every day, the bird appeared above.
It spiralled slowly in corkscrews,
Slowly, the rabbit soon realised, downwards.
It touched the ground without a sound.
Perhaps it was her soft, white feathers.
And no matter what the rabbit said,
The dove would just watch.
For weeks stone travelled up those feathers.
And the rabbit could do nothing but walk around her in circles.
Then would talk every night with the statue.
And neither of them saw the owl again.
Dora Westwood Flood (University of Kent): I care about how a lot of our ‘garden maintenance’ is actually harmful to the overall ecosystem, such as cutting the lawn, or replacing it with AstroTurf. The countryside feels dead: just walk outside and count the bugs to see how we have been impacting the environment. As a society we depersonalise living beings when we want to exploit them, and whilst commonly this is with people (who we convince ourselves are less than human, or at least less human than us) a similar perspective is still common right now with the natural world. This exploitation is a very short term, materialist way of thinking that has and will continue harming us.
The Martlet in my fable might represent this natural way of thinking and living. The owl (our current way of living and seeing things, a predatory creature) is who we walk with everyday, and the Martlet is almost a dream we are looking up towards. In our current worldview nature revolves around us, as the Martlet flies around the rabbit. When we let go of our current way of thinking and meet with nature, we will see that it is as important as the land we walk on (and indeed one in the same). The rabbit then walking around the Martlet represents a shift in worldview, where we see how our lives revolve around nature. And we never see the unnatural way of thinking again.