June 14, 2010
from the War Birds series: British infantrymen release carrier pigeons from the trenches to communicate with the tank brigades.
In the early 1940s, my grandfather raised homing pigeons in a small town in rural Virginia.
During the Second World War, he was a conscientious objector and refused to fight. He was sent to a work camp in Virginia. He left behind his pigeons.
His wife – my grandmother – bore the full burden of social disapproval. While the other young brides knitted scarves and worked in factories and wrote letters overseas, her husband was in prison, confined with the complexity of the morality of his era.
Perhaps frustrated by her predicament, my grandmother gave away her husband’s entire collection of homing pigeons to the Allied war effort, which needed them to communicate between tank companies on the Western front and throughout Germany.
And thus Noah’s doves of peace became complicit. From other perspectives, they became winged engines of absolution.
My grandfather’s pigeons probably flew over Bavaria, where I am now. Today I went to visit another artist’s studio, where one glass wall is covered in large black stickers in the shapes of falcons.
Otherwise, doves fly into the glass, thinking it is open sky.