Fables usually end by telling you what to think. Michael John Pickering's "A Fable" sets a scene, lets two crows announce a moral, and then shows how little that moral is worth. The poem's real subject isn't the crows. It's the human onlookers who decide, by the end, that the birds are rather nice.
The opening image is ugly and exact: "a pollarded tree, / totally defoliated by caterpillars, / draped in hideous silk." Pollarding is a human act of cutting a tree back, so the tree was already mutilated before the insects arrived. "Draped" suggests a shroud, and "silk," usually a luxury word, turns repellent. Nature here isn't gentle. Before anyone speaks, we've seen a landscape in which things consume other things.
The cat scene extends this. Two crows corner a cat, and the cat's retreat is described in a run of slow adverbs: "slowly, discretely, admitting defeat imperceptibly." The long, soft final word drags the line out as the cat edges away trying to save face. The spelling "discretely" means "separately" rather than "discreetly." It may be a slip, but it accidentally suits an animal keeping its distance. The crows' bullying is real, yet the narrator reports it flatly, without comment.
Then the crows talk. "We do violence to no-one," says the first, "stabbing with his beak / at a piece of orange peel." The gesture undercuts the words. The peel is harmless, so the claim is technically safe, and the verb "stabbing" lets the violence leak into the sentence anyway. The second statement is more revealing: "No-one need kill or eat / anyone who (a sparrow / flew past carrying a caterpillar / to its little ones) / that is anybody in this world." The speech breaks off at "anyone who," and a parenthesis breaks in with a sparrow feeding its young on a caterpillar. The crow's philosophy dissolves into evasion, and "that is anybody" shows the trick. Everything depends on who counts as a "one." The caterpillar, which has just wrecked a tree and is now being eaten, evidently doesn't count. The crow's pacifism works only because it defines its victims out of existence.
The final movement shifts from "I" to "we." The narrator finds it "nice to see" the crows meeting on "the midden of Mammalian Enterprises." The setting is the waste bins of a co-op, but the language is corporate: "meet," "conversing," "Enterprises." A midden is an ancient rubbish heap, and "Mammalian" reminds us that the cat, the onlookers and the poem's readers all belong to the same animal family. As the birds grow familiar, "putting us at less distance / from year to year," the humans reach their verdict: "how tame they are, and, / seen close to, / quite likeable." The poem stops there, with no full stop, as if the process of getting used to something never quite finishes. "Quite likeable" is a perfect piece of understatement. We have seen the cat cornered and heard the crow's slippery logic, yet familiarity has won us over.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and lines of uneven length, many of them short and plain. Its prose-like rhythm suits the deadpan narrator, who sounds like someone describing a walk to a neighbour. Latinate words such as "defoliated" and "imperceptibly" stand out against that everyday diction, giving a faintly bureaucratic tone. Quotation marks, a parenthesis and enjambment across "anyone who / (a sparrow" make the poem hesitant and interrupted, a good match for an argument that doesn't hold together.
What makes "A Fable" worth reading is that it keeps the old form but withholds its comfort. A traditional fable hands you the moral. This one lets you work out that the moral is about us: how easily polite language excuses harm, and how comfortable proximity can dull our judgement. It's a small poem, but it leaves you wondering what else you've found "quite likeable" simply because it has become familiar.