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# Bruegel, Columbidae, and Walking Home
- URL: https://www.merionwest.com/bruegel-columbidae-and-walking-home/
- Published: 2025-01-17T22:19:01.000Z
- Updated: 2025-06-26T14:14:39.000Z
- Author: Joseph Hunter
- Tags: Poetry, Arts, Legacy, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2025-05-06 12:48

**Pieter Bruegel the Elder, *The Battle Between Carnival and Lent* (1559)**

> I imagine them in mud, steaming people, bony

> hands joined to the land, farming with fingers

> clawing furrows in the earth, dreaming of rain.

> Someone begat someone who begat someone, who

> begat someone else (etc) then you and I which means:

> look down and see them in a puddle’s rainbow.

> Bruegel showed them wearing clean and bright clothes, with

> wimples white, and horns on their caps, and masks

> leering, cups spilling, playing dice, dancing.

> Memento vivis: taste a thousand years

> in a cup of wine, eternity in bread

> there’s a harvest festival in our blood.

**Columbidae**

> Ice picks on black ice, scrabbling

> the slate roof, my skull trepanned

> lying in my teenage bed, coddled

> listening to pigeons.

> They were rock doves once, they lived in

> cliffside roosts pecking sea salt spray

> gathering hedge-berries inland

> flying home by lay lines.

> Cooing that sounds like *cruel* repeated

> I feel honoured, like they have

> gathered here to bow their heads

> over me in feathered prayer.

> We made them, or maybe say this:

> we unmade them and we broke them

> moulded their wildness and turned it

> into a hopeless love

> then abandoned them. Pigeons are

> broken pieces of our scattered

> conscience. Listen to them, up there

> gathering again.

**Walking Home**

> On my walk home a tunnel of trees

> narrow and enfolded, shifting green

> in summer shimmering, tectonic

> blue magma breaking through leaf fault-lines.

> For a long time I walked home in sound

> ears plugged with New York, Detroit, London

> tape-hiss stroking cochlea, finger

> on spring-loaded moulded plastic button.

> In winter the tunnel was dark, tactile

> the trees were stripped and shivering

> an idea of giants overhead, sighing

> eyes closed or open, I walked the same.

> And then a tide of blood fell back in me

> after that I walked with open ears

> I found that the trees had voices, and

> they sang like forgotten, sunless seas.

> I know that something has gone from me

> I don’t know what it is or where it went

> I used to walk home gladly, with light steps

> there was a last time, but it went unmarked.

> I think of my parents at the far side

> of that tunnel of trees—summer, winter:

> the place the beginning seems to be

> is where you will find the end*.*

### *Joseph Hunter is a fiction writer and poet based in Manchester in the United Kingdom. His writing has appeared with Fairlight Books, Crocus Books, and Willows Wept Review. He teaches at the University of Manchester, where he is completing a PhD. He is co-editor of The Manchester Review.*