On Encountering a Leucistic Peacock in the Churchyard of St. Wystan’s

A sonnet

For who but God the Creator of all things has given to the flesh of the peacock its antiseptic property? This property, when I first heard of it, seemed to me incredible; but it happened at Carthage that a bird of this kind was cooked and served up to me, and, taking a suitable slice of flesh from its breast, I ordered it to be kept, and when it had been kept as many days as make any other flesh stinking, it was produced and set before me, and emitted no offensive smell. And after it had been laid by for thirty days and more, it was still in the same state; and a year after, the same still...

~ Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Book XXI

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As I was touristing amongst the dead

With grass nearwild at jeanhems fingering,

Amidst the gravestones louchely lingering,

There I espied upon a grassy bed

The creature cloudwhite and regal, its tail

A white carpet; its eye a jewel of jet.

It once was thought – perhaps some think it yet –

That foul decay could not their flesh assail.

We know better: our world is unredeemed,

And pale peafowl, for all their comely worth,

No better than we can dust’s due defy.

And yet that bird of alabaster seemed

In brightness to rebuke the riddled earth;

A fallen fragment of the ageless sky.