“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If there’s anything I like to see
It’s a bunch of pudgy God-fearing grown men at it again,
Shooting down the starlings.
I mean, crazy man. Go, go, go.
Why not have a band play and give balloons away?
There’s nothing like killing birds
To clean up the business section.
We could feature a Starling Day, for our centennial celebration,
Such elation as the city fathers
And other pot-bellied elders
Did their best to keep the city clean.
We could give ice cream away to the kids who killed the most,
The hosts of observers could yell the cheer:
“Oh, it takes such courage and it takes such brawn
To drop the blackbirds on the County House lawn.”

Then strange dull sounds; commotion. Startled, I went to the window, hardly able to believe my eyes. The police were shooting down the starlings that always nested in the treetops. Real fury rushed through me. My eyes brimmed over with tears. I stood at the window and dashed out this poem — far too emotionally unrestrained to be aesthetically a good one but an excellent example of my feelings at the time.

Unknowingly, in my poetry I had barely begun to form some concepts that would help me. Just before the sessions began the idea of “The Idiot” came to me as a symbol of inner truth that appears to be complete nonsense to the reasoning mind at times; or at best, highly impractical in normal living. I’d written two poems on the idea, and the day after the starlings were killed, I did another:

The idiot cries.
The tears slosh inside his boots.
The people say he’s bats
Because he weeps
When the police shoot down the starlings
Aiming at the tall-eyed trees.

[...] Ruburt’s vehement anger over something that seems perhaps much more trivial, the death by shooting of the starlings, is a case in point.

(Upon going to work at the gallery yesterday noon, Jane saw more dead starlings scattered on the lawns. [...]

[...] I did incidentally watch Ruburt write one of his poems about the starlings, and though poetry was never one of my lines I have to admit that I was quite impressed.

[...] This is of course one of the main reasons for his particular reaction with the starling incident, and this quality has been a saving one in the past.

(“Why was Jane so upset about the killing of the starlings at the art gallery by the police over the weekend? [...]