THE APPROPRIATION OF BIRDSONG

Poems by Peter Oswald

This is a collection of birds real and imaginary. Of birds struggling to survive in the human world, and humans struggling to survive in the world of birds.

Contents

Birds

An Explanation of the Scenery

Bluetit

Larksong

Winter

Winter Again

The Blackbird Replies

Blackbird

Thrush

Linnet?

Swallow

April Swallow

Wren

Rooks

More Rooks

Nothing

Call
Raven

Crow

Death of the River

Kingfishers

Swans

Swan

Swansong

Seagull

Seagull Again

And Again

London

Four Cormorants

Gannets

A Shearwater Dead on Deck in the Morning

Little Stint

Dawn Chorus

The Cock is Screeching in the Henhouse

Poem for Woodwind

Owl

The Night-Dove

Bigger and Bigger Birds

The Bird

Eaten Alive by Small Birds in South Devon

Twitcher

The Air

The End

South West Wetlands Field Birds Survey

BIRDS.

An almost infinite endeavour
Weighed on me once – a gravestone sky.
Then by the sleep-talk of a stream

A wagtail flicked its yellow feathers

From rock to rock – a tick, a sign

Of courtesy and grace. Another time,

My eyes were dragged into the sea

As if I was a fish on land

Caught by an angler who had drowned.
Then I saw stepping on the sand
A tiny bird, but bigger than the sea.
With its strict manner it reproved the sea.

Now I can walk through thorns and fire

And they are always there – I see

The winter branches green with finches.

AN EXPLANATION OF THE SCENERY

After the drowning of the flightless angels

Who had panicked all over the land,
Crying out

In a lost language  -

As the dark shape of Noah’s boat slid overhead,

Silence spread out on the earth,
That had already swallowed

The falsetto chatter of the dinosaurs

And transformed the roaring

Of the whales into delicate stretched strands of radio noise,
And struck dumb the talkative flowers.

After all this had happened,

And the waters, yet again, receded,

The drowned angels

Stood scattered all over the earth,

Absolutely no sound coming out of them.

Then, after some months, no sound

But a multitude of elongating points pushed out of them,

Opening a canopy of fans

The precise colour of silence.

All over the earth silence deepened by some hundreds of fathoms.

And was suddenly broken

By a bluetit

BLUETIT

This song like scissors in the morning

Cut my anger into ribbons

LARKSONG

News from heaven.
Same again today.
Victory.

WINTER

Turkey oak in full jackdaw

Apple tree with ripe stockdoves

Sycamore shedding its greenfinches

Silver birch coming into bluetit

WINTER AGAIN

Rooks – for a shrieking minute

Black leaves thick

In the bare trees

THE BLACKBIRD REPLIES.

He cocks his head on one side,
An old man listening to a child.

Or a terrier tensed for the rabbit

To leap into daylight

Just ahead of the ferret.

Silent as a cheese-taster

Listening to the taste of the cheese.

Or the off-duty seismologist

In the roar of Los Angeles,

Gauging his underground feeling.

A G.P. listening again to the body
Articulating its complex pathology

In baby language.

Not an anthropologist
Interrogating a shaman,
But the shaman

Replacing his ears with the wind.

Mozart on a visit to Leipzig,

Listening to Bach for the first time.

Thin from the larynx

Of exhausted mines,

The seed of a sound,

‘Passchaendaele, Treblinka, Soham,’

The earth sighs

And

“Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace!”

The blackbird replies.

BLACKBIRD

Lover without hands

or lips or visible skin,

or soft feet to press together

in the first cold under the covers

lover whose lizard fingers

clutch at the tree’s bones

no words of deferring

or any defence,

no dreams

in the day or the night,

phonecalls or photos or rings

no doubt.

Fixed by a spear

through the heart to your theme

of the one, of the one

out on a limb

that is out on a limb

that is out on a limb

of the afternoon stars

sharp mask held up, up

in the cold and the crippling wind

of your own lovesong

THRUSH.

Small sharp bones in the dead holly leaves

Show that you have fulfilled your duty

And fell dismantling the city,

Which you did not achieve completely.

Though brick by brick you lifted the chimneys

Into the vapours passing over

With their disintegrating gestures,

And blurred the pavements into blue distance,

They, when your song ceased, took back solidity.

All you entirely could unravel

Was yourself, as God will break the world

Into a song without words or music.

LINNET?

What are you smooth small bird apple-green following the shape of the apple tree, to right, to left, and you flutter in the shapes between the branches, you are improvising on the theme of the tree, left and right, leaf-light, as leaves flutter down so you flutter up, to the very end the very thinnest lightest, now up first left then right to the

topmost

vertical

waving

flag

you don’t touch it you fly up it, imitate it praise it and vanish

SWALLOW

one two three four then lost it

concentrate concentrate

(how without weight or wit?)

one two three four then all

over the place then

one two three four then lost it

APRIL SWALLOW

You slapstick sparrows in a gang,

You black-cloaked lurking jackdaw villains,

You fairy seagulls trailing tinsel,

You starlings wittily ad-libbing

Have all been suddenly outdone

By this trapezist who has swung

Shining around the globe to end

Your long-extended pantomime. 

WREN.

Among the sticks

The wren has evolved briefness.

Were you once otiose,

Sweeping the air like seagulls in long alexandrines?

Now you are a pinprick

Among the bramblehooks.

In the treetops Great Tits recite the dead epics -

You are shrinking a sonnet.

All the great paragraphs have gone down into the earth,
But you persist,
Micro-tyrannosaurus,

Critic of the thicket.

Your ambition,

To be an instant.

ROOKS

We vastly outnumber the humans in this valley.

We scatter from one to another hilltop crown.

This is the life of rooks, the high life,

The talkative life,

Complex as entrails.

The framework of the air is trees,

A living work that grows up,

Pushes up under the feet

With bending strength,

A sprung floor;

All through its webs the wind goes

Like ants rushing through tunnels

With eyes shut, guided

By bright invisible threads of scent.

Further down, under the dark,

The same webwork is reflected in the depths of the earth,

A fixing reflection,

That holds the tree as your form in water

Holds you to yourself.

All this rises through us in shrieks

At sunrise and sunset;

We might speak about lightning in shocked terms,
With burnt words,

Or about the sky like a furious cheated bride

Trying to tear itself loose from the earth,

But unable,

Always waking up with the same dirty old man.

About the breakers of air

Whose charred spray we are,

The gulf, the gulp of downfall,
Caught always like a sob turned croak.

The tall ghosts go in through the churchdoor.

Then rhythmical singing escapes

Out of the stained glass arches,

Songs about roofs, about stone walls, about regular baths.

But through us rises

Gossip of the veinwork of leaves,

And the twists of timber springing apart,

Hoarse and nonsense songs

About everything smashing itself to bits

And then flinging itself back together.

MORE ROOKS

The rooks gather in court

To defend themselves.

They are not, they declare, omens

Either of grace or of doom;

They are not weather forecasters,

Not singers of raucous songs;

They cannot, in fact, speak.

The rooks croak,
Emptying their emptiness.
But there is no end to it,

Tiny zero bubbles of nothingness

Rising out of a nought,

Not the least bit diminishing it.

How bright are the eyes
Lit by interior darkness,

What piercing glances dart

Out of the fog of unconsciousness.

How hard it is to stand on any kind of eminence

And not take on some kind of significance.

NOTHING

The nothing-rooks are in the air,

Nothing to me –

I free of them, they free of me.

Nothing deciphered of each other’s tongue.

They will not come to tea,

I will not climb

Into their city,

To sit among the eggs and sing,

Or like a vicar try to fire

Their charcoal souls

Or catch

The feather of their faith that drifts downwind

Into the crap and bone-heap of their sins.

Nothing to me, the rooks are in the air.

Not in my head, nowhere I find

Them in my mind,

Only the air

Like a Rosetta stone wiped clean.

Nothing to them, I leave them be.

Also the grass, the stars, the wind,

And every type of shrub and tree

And all of cloud and mineral history.

CALL

Who will pick up the raven

That dial-tones in the dark pine this morning?

Gives up, tries again,

Urgent enough to try a third time.

Love or death alone enough

To make it try again now a fourth time.

Who will pick up the raven?

RAVEN

To have the happiness of the raven

That cries with dark delight

Along the ridge of the mountain,

Far from the city of crows. The raven

Speaks his croak to the far side of the valley,

And space expands it into happiness, and it comes back

And he sends it out again and it comes back

As he himself did not, to Noah’s boat,

Because the world was saved, the world was saved.

CROW

Where are your roots, black rose?

Your song is thorns

That snag the ear.

Your bed is air.

You flower suddenly there and there.

Suddenly a field is all black roses,

Suddenly a tree,

Suddenly the air.

Stillness that shifts

In jumps and flutters,

Instantly rooted

Forever,

Though you just left,

Having just got there.

Standing stones

That flock and scatter,

You were always there

Wherever you are.

DEATH OF THE RIVER.

Down by the river

I saw a kingfisher

Smack full tilt into a low bridge.

Two swans were swapping punches
And black eyes,

Sprawling around in the mud.

The ducks were just sat in a line

On the bridgerail, staring,

Sunk in a green gloom,

Nothing to do.

A drift of grubby seagulls was mocking and mobbing
A single immaculate eider

Making for the sea.

With extreme difficulty

Maintaining her dignity

For the duration of that terrible river.

KINGFISHERS.

The moon is a riot of footprints.

Mars is orange with streetlights.

Obsolete flying machines
Completely cover the ground.

This is too much for the crocuses.

But here come the kingfishers,
Crossing it all out

With swift azure strokes.

SWANS

SWANS

Question marks on the lake are asking,

Am I myself or my reflection?

SWAN

With gracious bending of the head

Acknowledging the offerings

Of the adoring pilgrim stream

And saying without use of sound

You see I can’t accept a thing

I have no hands.

SWANSONG

Swan head down in the

Stereo both ears clamped

In the rush of a

Popular song, head up

To the disintegrating

Rhythms, people dogs, head down

Again to the

Old tune

SEAGULL

A single obstreperous mood has spread through the whole race

Stamping every man woman and child with the merciless mutinous face

Of a rude girl in a rage against everything struggling in vain to escape from her own

grace

SEAGULL AGAIN

wingtip-writing on the sky invisibly,

cup of a y maybe one field wide,

tail a deep dive, or downglide,

and recover. Then rub it all out,

then self also erased: gone

then there again between houses,

writer without ambition,

always erasing

and gone again

and reappears plural,

but still nothing –

again carefully

over and over again writing and rubbing out nothing,

gone again leaving nothing

but blots and traceless drifting unrealised notions

AND AGAIN

Forms of despair unfolding

White, from the wet and the clay sky.

Blank sheets, wishing the wind to write on them,

Open and open.

Following the doodled line

From nowhere to the sea and back again.

Unwrapping bundles of nothing,

White whitens and whitens.

Turns into stars that drown

And dawn as despair again.

LONDON

Quick gull starving for river

over the identical mountains,

shrugging and shrugging through

the grey wool above London.

What superior beings

are we who sustain

lives above roof height

with our empty baked bean tins?

FOUR CORMORANTS.

We are four cormorants flying

Away to the east.

Not in the least geese,

Not pigeons. Primitive birds.

You would not have to take away

Much from us to make us nothing.
Strip us to a flying spine,

Put an end to everything.

Still we come round again,

In a different world, the same

Four cormorants flying.

GANNETS

If you must sink, sink into this

Shiver of yellow and bright red

Over the grass that bends its back

Against the wind, as the sea does.

And these white birds that drown their hooks

And rise, wish-winged, back to the light,

If you must sink, sink like that

A SHEARWATER DEAD ON DECK IN THE MORNING.

Have no fear though I here

Fell sheer out of air

By cable stopped

And neck-broken sprawl on deck

In the grey first when seals stir

And clouds hurry together to cover

As darkness tried, the bright empty place right up there.

You in my dead eye, compass-bubble

Or stopped sphere, shine clear,

As the stone there that steered me here

To a stop in the air, not misled

By stars or that inward crystal

On sharp wings that sheared

The waves that sheared the white fleece of the air.

On course of course, there is no error,

Where you now gather in convex mirror

Your dawn regards sad or comic or blear

Or simply enquiring as the living

Do of the dead with slowed thoughts that stall

Or stick or fall like birds in thickening air.

LITTLE STINT

Hastily flung together out of found materials –

scraps of feather and bone mud-stained,

and the light off the river,

I must now nevertheless,

in obedience to my ordained

but still slapdash creation,

with all my gathered powers

(a small fanatical force)

put back together this place

that has been ingeniously ripped apart

by an insane intellect.

(So I suppose.)

These are my gifts:

needle eyes,

a dash of rush,

tweezer beak,

bones dry-grass-light,

simultaneous presence at all points of the compass.

With these alone, I, alone, must

simplify, for heaven’s sake,

this collapsing slag heap,

pick out the one clean grain

from among billions.

Thanks for my bee-busy wings!

Tidy mind!
The tide of forgetting!

DAWN CHORUS.

In death row this morning

The silence is appalling.

Not silence -

Not even the silence of Cage,

Broken only by the swish of your breathing

And the thump of your bloodstream

And the faint crackling of your brain’s caffeine.

Not the silence

Of the mind’s mouth

Or the wild horses

On cavewalls escaping;

Only the amplification of small sounds,

The D flat sodium hum of depression,
Bishops being picked up
And with a click set down,

The slow munching of the inmate determined

To beat his sentence by eating.

And now in the orange pre-dawn

In a tree of bare hope

One solitary convict

Starts singing.

Now the hills are being lifted

Out of the silence where they have been lying

In the indolence of chaos,

Lions in circus wagons,

Bewildered by the earth’s night-journeying.

A rush of green sound

Places them with the accuracy

Of space stations remotely manoeuvred

Into position.

This could be the rallying

Of every voice on earth for the final

Attempt to wake up the dead God

In his porphyry tomb,
But it is in fact the gracious invitation

To one dandelion to open
And people the universe with a shake of its infinite head.

Pause

In this up-pour,

And you are water in water;

You are turning around and around

In a curve of a rock in a stream

Where golden sandgrains are dancing;

The falling of all the waters of the world

Condensed to one sound,

The distillation

Of every tin cup on the planet

Accidentally clattering down granite steps,

The laughter of a prisoner

Into the eyes of his daughter

As she tosses the noose into the furnace.

Pause

And your ears are seacaves

In which the roar of the storm has risen

To a bat-note far above human hearing.

You are utterly sunk, sodden,
Gone green.

The occasional explosion of foam

Is a pheasant suddenly getting

A joke he was told before he was born.

Now he has stepped on a landmine,

In the sweet grass.

The blackbird is keeping its head

In the general confusion,

Where two armies of sound have rushed screaming

Into collision

And are now milling around,

Hacking, collapsing, crying

To their comrades, holding the gateways,
The high trees.

The blackbird leaps about,

Shouting commands, as in a sea-fight;

In a blink,
Up the rigging and along the yard-arm.

Who likened these singers to monks?
They are conjuring

The green roar of the hills,

They summon what the rivers are running from.

Robin and thrush and chiff-chaff and linnet and wren,

Lost in one voice, where song meeting song

Sparked a great conflagration.

Now they are hopping here and there in separation,

Having survived themselves,

Fragments of their own passions.

But the work is done.

Someone on earth has given
Every shred of their breath to do justice

To the beginning.

THE COCK IS SCREECHING IN THE HENHOUSE

The cock is screeching in the henhouse.

Light like the scent of sex

leaks through the cracks in the wood.

Again he shrieks.

Free birds with their beaks, this winter dawn,

touch the air’s invisible strings.

Again in the wounded gloom he is shrieking,

all round him his wives like small rainclouds,

shifting a millimetre and then

shifting back again,

opening an eye of water.

The night is draining away like a cancer patient;

the light is impossible,

increasing like the grief of the relatives;

again and again he screeches, and beats his wings,

as the light bites like lice.

All the free birds, awake, are now ranged in the trees

like thoughts in different parts of the brain.

He screams like Christ and strains his wings,

and the wives shift and shift back again,

and now the traffic is flowing to a stop and flowing again,

people are walking, even dogs are set loose,

freighters breast the mist, with boasting of foghorns.

His screeches increase and increase again,

but look now, look, it is lifting,

the black hat of the henhouse

is lifting right off, it has blown right off

and the cock is exploding

azure and scarlet and tangerine

and all of the hens, damp flames,

are fluffing their feathers and shaking their heads and

turning back into chickens

POEM FOR WOODWIND

Ok try this.

Close your eyes

in a place where there are pigeons.

Now imagine they’re musicians,

playing wind instruments,

sitting in the trees.

They can look like whatever you like.

What are they up to, all day sitting in the trees,

blowing through their wooden pipes?
Several now are playing together. Now just one.

Now three together again,

more or less the same tune, more or less the same rhythm.

Over again. One plays near,

now another answers far away, in the green tree invisible.

One shakes a branch, for a joke, one claps,

now all clap together.

A long pause. What are they all doing,

what are they all talking about, whispering between playing,

sitting in the trees all day, playing the same tune

over and over? The first one they ever learned.

Called something like

The Planks of the Schoolroom Door,

or The Mottles on the Shed Window.

A long pause.

Why haven’t they ever learned another one?

Now they all come in together again,

and stop, gasping for breath, giggling –

the kind of joke only musicians get.

What are they doing, are they on drugs?

Blowing through their wooden pipes,

all day sitting in the trees, what are they doing?
Now open your eyes again.

OWL

Frankly, blankly,

the owl has looked at me.

Black sky behind,
head inclined slightly.

One moment, two moments, three.

Now all the black I have looked at

is looking at me.

THE NIGHT-DOVE

The night dove sings in the thick of the willow,

The night-dove sings,

Skimming the grass with blight wings.

And stands in the road and stares

with eyes that are coffins soft to lie in

Gazing at the surface of the sea

Far

Far

Above

Thee

The souls of the damned are bluetits

In the buckthorn

The night-dove wins them reprieve

For as long

As her song

BIGGER AND BIGGER BIRDS.

Bigger and bigger birds

Are tried out on the air.

They stall, spin, dive.

Wider and wider areas

Are crushed flat with feathers.

The air cannot bear such fliers,

It sags like a straw chair

Under the Lord Mayor.

They strain, their eyes flash terror.

Weight compels them down

Into field, marsh or town,

As if to demonstrate a theorem

Over and over again

And never move on.

THE BIRD.

Each time I reach the field

The bird has got there first,

And quivers in the grass, too big.

With greasy quills out-fanned,

And scraps of crabs around,

And stars of guano and the puke

That it jets in its rage.

And in the hedge all around,

The crazy chorus choirs its praises,

And in the air, higher and higher,

The note of its refinement rises.

My human mind is smashed and scattered,

A bee-swarm by a gunshot shattered.

EATEN ALIVE BY SMALL BIRDS IN SOUTH DEVON

I am staked out for the birds to peck at,

My belly of lard,

My head of suet.

The wood-dove carries off my shyness

To her high nest.

The jackdaw

Pecks all the dead words out of my mouth.

Magpies

Steal my weak eyes.

Now my head floods with rain,

And I return with them

To their various roosts and their various songs.

TWITCHER.

No more for me the vague wash of song,

And the blurred flurrying of the half-known

From oblivion into oblivion.
I have magnified them,

I have given them names,

I know the places of their mating

And of their dying,

I know the likes and dislikes of their nestlings.

They have made a sky of my mind.

Their masks adorn the halls of my imagination.

Yet God is more present to the atheist

Than I am to them,

As they dance in the dawn air,
Disbelieving.

THE AIR

Now I will go up into the air,
And twist my mind into the wind’s weave.

Much more is rising than falling -

Steeples reaching a certain height

Break open releasing

Seeds that gyrate in the vane-spinning

North to south stepping,

Bright blue eyed twelve league booted

Invisible hurrying

That will turn, at the absolute limit of all things,
And stream back to the beginning.

Listen to them, hatching on the wing,
Bubbles of music bursting,

High up above the leads and the flagstones,

Instantaneous rainbows of sound.

As the congregation

Drop like sacks to their knees,

Blue flames are flickering

From their nostrils and mouths.

Much more is rising than falling,
Even my own wings,

Shedding what is wrongly called down -

It curls away up very quickly.

The surface of the earth now

Is sweating rivers of steam.

Someone flicks a match into a rick

And the whole thing is leaping

Up like a demon,

Shuddering and rolling, pulling

Itself up by its own skin,

Shaking out in all directions,

Raping the pale clouds,

Rushing off into nothing.

Much more is rising than falling.
Here come the thoughts of old men,

Wrapped in brown tissue paper,

Unwrapping, revealing - nothing.

Hearts like hot air baloons

Clutter the airlanes,

Flare-off of opinions,

Confused updrift from colleges
And hospitals, turbulent fog over prisons,

Repetitive hours sloughed off

As gossamer skins,

Shop window reflections,

Abstractions, girl magazines,

Blueprints, cancelled plans, missed meetings

Of eyes, all insubstantial things,

Limp in the updraught

Of the inverse autumn,

Swift in the slipstreams,

Extinctions, abortions,

Earth’s onion skins,

In endless perpendicular procession,

Kites without strings

And rice paper paintings.

And the pre-speech of infants,

Blown about husk-winged

And jewel-eyed,

With legs dangling.

Not one word falls to the ground.

All rise, a good haul

For the wind’s fishing,

Letters decoupling, tangling,

Paragraphs pulled apart by the crosswinds,

Where the swallows dive like dolphins

In the sardine run,

And schools of starlings flash turning

Through the radio waves,

Chat chopped by the chinook.
I flinch through crowds of sighs,

The daily trade of small deaths,

Lives lighter than air
Floating out of the flesh,
Shrews, fleas, field mice, lacewings,

Plummeting upwards

Through the transparent webwork

Of shifting hexagons,

A beehive construction,

Turned inside out and

Inside in 

At the speed of breathing;

Seven mile high shafts of

Invisible steel

Bending and twisting,

Plates of air

Like oceans on end,
Tilting, colliding, smashing, with no debris,

Except the strings of gulls, dangling.

Emerald and topaz crystals

Crash straight through me.

Now the earth breathes in her sleep,
Odour of seeds, odour of cities.

Entire seas rise

With a yawn, half asleep,

Climbing the stairs of the sky

In the furnace of dawn,
To the bathroom.

Cobras of smoke uncoil

From the baskets of cities.

Much more is rising than falling,

All things desire to be cloud,
And will have their turn

In the centrifugal machine,

Joy riding,

All the heavy mourners by the grave,
Will shoot up like rockets one day!

Now the whole earth is rising,

Lifting her head from the pillow

To me bending,

The far lines drawn together

As if by a string’s tugging,

The grand reach and scale of fences and woodlands

Collapsing and vastly expanding

To this one damp green field

In which I am standing.

THE END.

Now subtlety began to withdraw from the earth,

Rising from innumerable fires, a smoke-screen,

That had once been a dust of love, covering everything.

So the flocks of crested gods, 

The feathered visions, 
Began the ascent

To their ancient stations,

And the simplified earth

Now articulated

With a language of gaps

A sequence of final solutions.

SOUTH WEST WETLANDS FIELD BIRDS SURVEY

It was the morning of a day.

In a green field the wind was crawling

Backwards, old lady with her dogs

And bags, with many snags and struggles,

Through the spiked hedgerow gaps. The sky,

Absent-mindedly mouthing silently,

Unravelled its white suit, blue fingers

Teasing out strands the earth was spinning

Into a bright new piece of nothing.

Stiff stood the hollow squares of hedges,
Blind, after such a long bombardment

Of airy light and all that tumbles

Heavily through the weather’s fingers,
Hail, that can travel horizontal,

Struck by the wind’s straight bat. They pointed

Crookedly bayonetted muskets

In all directions, only certain

That these were not the fields of Eton.

Over the green a bird came whirring,

Like a flat stone that slaps the water

And makes a single leap grey-blurring

To the far bank. It sank between

Its lifted wings into the stirring

Of spears. The shining sky turned over

In its grey sleeping bag that foundered

Like a great sodden corpse of timber

Sucked by a circle of swift water.

And now another bird. It fluttered

With its legs dangling, swiftly closer

And low, a smear of rust-red feathers,

And quickly sank. It clearly reckoned

It could be wriggled any second

Out of its own skin, seemed to crave

Invisibility like whiskey.

And now a motley Lord, knock-kneed,
Came flopping down along the sky,

Like a born clown auditioning

Against the odds to play the King;

Black-crested helmet, wobbly wings -

Shrugged once and suddenly was standing

With its sad face above the green.

Now came a tumbled scrap of bunting,

Like a blown frag of dust, an outfling

Of a disintegrating mountain,

High as a schoolboy’s hopes its piping,

Almost unheard, almost unseen,
Almost but not quite not existing;

Swung hard into the hedge and clung

To a tall aerial of ash, slow-bending.

Then suddenly another bunting,

Greyer, beside it. Now a vision

With blackrimmed amber eyes came racing

Triangular, from wind to wind,

Cornering sharply, wings of sand

Black-streaked, and calling like a mother

To her son lost in foreign waters.

It seemed about to hit the ground

Like a kite, sideways, but was standing,

Suddenly, folded, by the other

Tall bird among the six now gathered

In the thick grass and in the upgrowth

Of the spare hedge. The sky leaned over

And cried a little on the clover.

Crex, crex, the Corncrake began.

Now silence descended again,

As if the birds reckoned their thoughts better put

By the rips in sky and hedge,

Absence of words so apt that their silence

Might have sailed on like the Marie Celeste,

Unstoppably,

Till it fixed in the ice
At the end of all speech.

But the wrongness of their flock, a Grey Partridge,
A Lapwing, a Cirl Bunting, a Corn Bunting,
A Stone Curlew and a Corncrake,

Flicked a sandgrain into the cogs of their silence.

I do not know why I am here, said the Grey Partridge.

There are not many of us left, said the Lapwing.

Crex, crex, said the Corncrake.

Where there was arable and grazing, 
Now there is only arable.

Where there was grazing and arable,
There is only grazing, said the Lapwing,

The hedges are thin,

Ripped by the trimmer too often,

Poor Hawthorn;

Scant shelter there for the buntings,
Few perches for their display singing.

This Disney field

Of one colour will be cut soon,

All skylark eggs broken,

And they will lay again soon, but too soon

Comes another cutting;

Four times in one season!

Nitrogen

Favouring what thrives on nitrogen

Persecutes the insects our chicks eat,

Sawflies and moth larvae!

Weevils, aphids, ground beetles!

It is the lateness of the sowing

And the earliness of the cutting,

Right in the middle of the breeding season,

And the scarceness of barley;

It is the miserliness of the field margins

Where the small birds feed

That will not stray far from cover,
Even if starving.

And you can’t argue with a tractor,

Taking every inch, ploughing right up to the hedge,

Maybe carrying away a part of the hedge, why not?

It is the cutting from edge to centre,

Leaving no corridor

From the desperate diminishing island,

It is the speed of the tractors,

It is the tiredness of the drivers!

It is the tallness of the sward,

Too high for our nesting,
Under the whip of the ubiquitous nitrogen;

It is the ever increasing

Density of stock, trampling

Our nests in the almost insectless improved pasture;

It is the tidiness, the vanishing

Of odd field corners, rich in weeds and therefore in insects;

Where are the brambles?

Where are the nettlebeds, 

Perfect for partridges, 

Where are the wetlands?

The stubborn scrub, the wandering magnificent gorse,

The mix, the patch, the rough grass

Round telegraph poles, unstrimmed,

Round ponds, the this and the that, the tangle and the maze and the mess,

The ragged track, the tatty thatch.

Fat hen, redshank, chickweed, 
All the unwanted weeds, these are what we want!

Knotgrass, bindweed, hemp-nettle,

The spilt grain, the undersowing

Of clover or turnips or mustard for fodder in winter,

Tussocky Cock’s Foot and Yorkshire Fog,

Large standard trees

For summering turtle doves!

And the dead wood left where it lies

For the tree sparrows,
And in the wetlands,

Alders and Willows.

The farming year that turns with the stars

Has turned against us,

All our needs are denied.

It is the fault of the farmers! Cried the Stone Curlew.

Do not blame the farmers! Said the Corn Bunting;

It is us, it is us, with our late breeding,

Right in the middle of his cutting!

Let him change his ways if he likes,

Let him change his mind!

Farmers love birds! Sang the Cirl Bunting.
If you only talk to them,

Once they have done one good thing, and seen the change,

They will come back and ask you what more they can do.

And they talk to other farmers, if to no one else!

And they get jealous -

Oh have you heard, Jones has lapwings?
How did he get them?

Consider the farmer, cried the Stone Curlew.

Who is this man or woman?
What has he done?

By what heavenly election
Has he grasped this position,

Where he holds us all in his hands, old or young?

The air we breathe, the ground we tread on,

The colour of our rivers,
It is all down to him!

Do we love trees? 

We must ask the farmer for them!

Delight in the foxcry?
Pray to the farmer’s shotgun!

The barn owl’s face? 

Pray to the farmer for provision!

Who is this fellow with powers wider

Than any archbishop or pope ever? 

Do you wish to dance with God in the springtime?
Ask the farmer!

That is precisely right, said the Grey Partridge,

Who is this man, how has he been chosen

To bend beneath the pressure of mountains

Of sugar and grain,

Wade through milk lakes,
Climb butter dunes?

Consider the farmer, sang the Cirl Bunting.

The Green Man’s shadow, the secret dancer

With the moonmad hare when his vertebrae juddered

By ruts are a heap of snores by the fire.

Once a man, now he is a coin

In international hands,
His fear is no longer the weather, his terror

Is the man in a blue suit reaching over the water!

I have heard that his heart has wings like ours,

Though his song is somewhat harsher and deeper.

My friends, will you not believe what I tell you?

Crex, crex, said the Corncrake.

No, said the Stone Curlew.

Then, said the Lapwing, who was their leader,

If it is not to be the farmer,

Who will restore these fields?

The courts? The Crown?

Poets? Actors?

Soldiers? Airmen? Sailors? The Circus?

Schoolchildren? Nurses? Firemen? Film Cameras?

The Church of Rome? The Church of England?

Who will give back life to this land?

A consortium of museums? 

No, it must be us, we must do it, said the Corn Bunting.

We must shake off the weather,
We must drop to the ground,

Leave our stretching nests,

Leave off singing

Our invisible javelins,

Leave the life of the trees,
The life of the air,

The brief life,

With speeded-up heartbeat,

The rush of the flock,

The picking through dust,

The quick step

From path to branch,

Cursing at cats;

Shed crests,

Take on weight,

Reek of smoke,
Moult flight,
Walk, speak,

Sleep through the dawn, and on,

Changed into trudging men, and telling them
What is lost,

What can be done.

Black silence.They had all been talking
At once, but suddenly midwinter

Fell on the present like a tiger,

Out of its ambush in the future,

Ripped out spring’s throat, and left it there

Bleeding to ice. The mad full moon

Of the truth rose in all their minds:
That they would have to take this on.

Each bird must change into a man.

Then they began to tremble, crying

Like cattle at a railway station,

And as they shook, their feathers fountained

Like an exploding coast. Their breasts

Balooned, their stick legs stretched and thickened,
Their sharp heads drifted upwards, bloating,

And their pink wingbones flexed and lengthened,

Gripping binoculars and folders

As they walked down to the big town, talking.