The Hens

Looking back, I see that not all the data was fully in when Michael and I decided to move to Virginia. We had factored in a lot of things as we considered the move, with water and garden spot two important considerations. People, of course.

What we hadn’t anticipated was the ticks, the wood ticks and the deer ticks, young and old and ravenous, which we discovered everywhere, town, field and forest, in our new home. We knew ticks from way back, but somehow things had changed since the old days on the farm, pulling a tick now and then from the dog, expecting some insect hitch hikers after frolics in the woods. Slowly we watched more and more people and animals getting sick from tick bites, and then we moved to the Sonoran Desert where there were other things to watch out for, and ticks rather fell off the radar.

 

While we were gone, ticks got to be a serious business, and returning to the woodland zone we found more people than not were dealing with some stage of tick borne disease.   Shopping mall, school playground, forest, field, there were ticks everywhere, including on us.

 

This is clearly out of balance, said we. So many ticks bit that the whole homestead started tilting to an anxious place, humans leading the way with constant checking of arm, leg and belly for ticks, stocking a line up of disinfecting remedies should a bite occur.

 

We’ve got to get some chickens, said we, to eat some of these ticks.

 

Choosing to add chores to our daily routine took some consideration, however, and while we considered we pushed clearing-away-tick-habitat-right-around-the-house to Priority Status Task, and daily chores included clearing out the yard landscaping and raking up the leaf litter along our regular pathways. And all the while, of course, we were thinking about getting chickens to help out.

 

Every now and then a chicken house would come up for sale on Craigslist, and each spring the local farm supply brought chicks into the store, with sales on feed and feeders and all the necessary equipment to support chickens. The chicken house kits were stacked right at the front door, and stopping in for feed, or fencing supplies, or a pair of new gloves, we’d walk right by them.   There was always one chicken house set up so that we could examine it and admire the fine features while at the same time know for sure that we could build one better and for less.

 

Weeks would go by, and then some Saturday morning one of us would say, lets get some chickens, and we’d sketch chicken houses and talk about where a yard might be put …And so the years passed.

 

One year the ticks were ­so bad that the chicken refrain became more strident. We’ve got to get chickens! And then the next year, what? The ticks weren’t so bad. Could it have been all that rain? Maybe we don’t need chickens after all.

 

And then one day a colleague at school announced that she was getting out of the chicken business, and her chicken house was for sale.

 

Well, Michael and I agreed, here is the test. Do we want chickens, or not? Chicken chores don’t take so awfully much time, and spending a lot of time with food, I always appreciate how birds eating kitchen scraps extend the journey of our produce on its way back to the soil. We had never actually seen her chicken house, but we knew it was farm-made. We said yes.

 

One Saturday morning, our colleague appeared, she and her husband hauling the whole kit and caboodle—a charming chicken house on wheels, fence panels for an enclosed yard, a feeder, a bag of feed, fifteen beautiful birds and a stack of egg cartons. We were all set up!

It might be that I have a deeper chicken problem than I am letting on. Years ago, I was a member of a chicken support group, friends with whom it was all right to show enthusiasm for these ancient dim-witted animals who bring such depth and color and balance to a homestead. We each had favorite breeds, but come spring one of us was sure to order a mixed breed run from the hatchery to enjoy samples of exotics mixed in with our common farm birds. We had chicks delivered by the U.S. mail and kept the peepers under lights in the cellar until they were old enough for the brave out-of-doors, and our children knew about caring for chickens and collecting the eggs that are the awesome reward.

 

I didn’t share all that with our colleague, as we worked to ready the yard so that we could release the birds who were talking impatiently in the chicken house, jostled after their farm to farm ride and ready for some sunlight. I did ask her, though, do you know the poem, The Hens, by Elizabeth Madox Roberts?

 

Though an experienced kindergarden teacher with an impressive collection of poems and rhymes at easy recall, our generous colleague didn’t know that poem. As I watched the truck drive away from our place, leaving the birds behind, I determined to copy out The Hens to send to her. I knew it from my childhood, had read it to my own children and often thought of its quite soothing rhythm, a rhythm that beautifully captured the settling conversation of the hens in a henhouse preparing for the night.

 

I went to pull down the poetry volume, worn from years of reading, that kept the poem safe in its pages on our library shelf.

 

The Hens

 

The night was coming very fast,

It reached the gate as I ran past.

 

I heard the words to the poem gently caressing my memories.

The Hens is an evening poem, a soothing poem for children unwinding from busy childhood days. It is a gentle rhythmic word picture that was part of our bedtime routine as parents, helping to bring our whole household into the gentle acceptance of night that the hens talk about as they find their roosting spots at the setting of the sun.

And then my modern self stepped up: wait – just find it online and you can print a copy straight from the computer. So much easier than copying the words out by hand!

And so I did that, went to the computer, and the poem came up quickly, a famous piece, early 20^th century, a poem with the gentle rhythmic quality that characterizes much of Roberts’ work .

 

The Hens by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

The night was coming very fast;
It reached the gate as I ran past.

The pigeons had gone to the tower of the church
And all the hens were on their perch,

 

Yes, that was it. I could feel the mood coming to me that Roberts had instilled in the poem, and I smiled to myself. It was going to be nice to have chickens again.

Then I noticed that the poetry site had an audio option, so I clicked that. It would be fun to hear the poem read to me, as I had read it so often to others. And then I recoiled in emotional horror.

The computer voice sending out the words to me had absolutely no quality of tone or rhythm that could create a peaceful mood. Instead tones were sharp and jarring, one dimensional and without cadence. Worse than a machine making machine sounds, it was a machine trying to speak human language, no hint of the softness of the end of day that sends the birds to roost, no warm tones of the human voice to covey the soft purring vocalizations of the hens. Presented in that way, the poem had no power, and my heart felt a deep sadness thinking that perhaps children were listening to the computer poem and might never hear the human gift that Elizabeth Madox Roberts had left for us with The Hens.

This is what Rudolf Steiner was warning us about, I knew at once, when he presented to Waldorf teachers this task: bring to your students lessons from your experience and convey your lessons in person, with your own voice.

We don’t rely on sound recordings in Waldorf schools, but rather practice speech to develop our human voices. Our goal is to present lessons, poems, songs, narrative and information with the human warmth that can most effectively reach our students. Pay attention to tone, we are advised, and to rhythm. Sound has the power to heal.

 

“The human voice pronounces words which set up waves of sound, penetrating by the ears into the brains of others, where images and thoughts are provoked,” Rudolf Steiner lectured in “Speech and Song” in 1922.

 

I know for sure that all the noises of our modern communication devices, the bings and bongs and computer generated “voices” that punctuate so much of our days, are helping to promote the nervous anxiety that has become a predominant characteristic of school children and their parents.

I also know that chickens have a rich and complex language. They scold me when I am late letting them out. They complain when they hit a fence and can’t get through. They chortle with pride at the laying of an egg, they cluck and coo and endlessly entertain children who visit the henhouse with a scattering of scratch for the birds. They seriously squawk at the approach of danger. And at night, they settle into acceptance of night with the softest warblings I know, so well described by Elizabeth Madox Roberts. The Hens. Please read it out loud.

 

The night was coming very fast;
It reached the gate as I ran past.

The pigeons had gone to the tower of the church
And all the hens were on their perch,

Up in the barn, and I thought I heard
A piece of a little purring word.

I stopped inside, waiting and staying,
To try to hear what the hens were saying.

They were asking something, that was plain,
Asking it over and over again.

One of them moved and turned around,
Her feathers made a ruffled sound,
A ruffled sound, like a bushful of birds,
And she said her little asking words.

She pushed her head close into her wing,
But nothing answered anything. 

 

 

We may indeed say that in speech there lies a most essential element of all earthly culture and civilization. By speech, human beings come together here on earth, and one man finds the way to another.      —  Rudolf Steiner, Speech and Song