All entries for Saturday 25 November 2006

Poetry, as threatened

Here’s the first salvo. These ‘animal’ poems may end up as a sequence under the working title of ‘The Forage Cap’. They may be released from captivity by animal rights activists.

Please tear them to shreds. The poems, that is. Not the activists.

: 25 Nov 2006 11:00 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Shrike

Call a harsh ‘chack’; song is a scratchy warble
catching my origins in a thicket of oak.
My passerine tact a mystery to the hawk.
A week in my wingspan is idle flit and hack;
my back’s bitter blood-bolt, the terse use of my beak
to keep my barbed-wire larder of corpses in stock.
No carrion-charmer, no falcon or red kite
I, peregrine, I pious in thought and act
am shriven in my little blood, my butcher’s reek.
In the wrack of my nest, in its bone-scree of voles and shrews
I am called to the questing retch of my home choir,
their eyrie-cry my kyrie eleison.

: 25 Nov 2006 11:00 |  Tags: Poetry |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Jackdaws

A jackdaw sweet, this half-sucked cherry lollipop
is the exact size and shape of the Black Prince’s Ruby;
a tumbled garnet from the garnet mouth of a lover
set in its claw-mount of silver-black tarmac.
Craving the tacky circumstance of rapture,
jackdaws dream, love-nesting the Crown of State.
They search for their eye-metal. I mistake this for lust.
Whatever angel knew about satisfaction
clearly flew through the car parks in jackdaw form
before we were born, to teach other birds how to spit.

: 25 Nov 2006 10:58 |  Tags: Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem