Hope, wrote Emily Dickinson, is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words And never stops – at all –

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In the right time

Bless to me Lord
As the days lengthen
The call to activity
To fresh air outdoors

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a slate grey dove on a wire
colourless under winter’s drizzle
shivers in the morning wind

safe behind my bedroom window
my hand upon the glass, I feel
the frigid force beyond it,

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Picture a feather in a clear blue sky, riding the currents, almost as light
as the air is itself.
The frailest of things, it might seem, so inconsequential
and yet…

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Shafts from an ambuscade of archers,
starlings flash hard west against the sky;
no time to stop and join the evening chorus –
can’t be late for the murmuration.

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The time that I worked in Costa
Taught me that food often returned unfinished;
Including the pots of yoghurt,
And the tubs of oats that came with them.

I would gather the oats in secret
As I worked out on the floor,
Saving them in the tubs they came in
As I took them to The Outback.

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From the furze, the gorse
Below Cuilcagh,
I see a crane
Lope into the sky.

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Frothy, salty sea spray, hurled up by the forceful tide
Day has turned to night so quickly – in the dark you hide
Wind rips through the heather – not much shelter to be found –
Battered by the North Sea’s waves while cold rain soaks the ground.

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Before Spring is warm
The fragile collective
Of tender crocuses bloom
Their hazy sea.

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she was born a Raven’s child
their plumage in her eyes
her darkness a love of secrets
and the prophecies they cried

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Over the shoulder blade escarpment
The dark cloud hangs heavy.
Below, the grey lake barely ripples.
In the wheaten reeds
A squeak-bark of a coot chick

 

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Hillside and lake, kissing
cousins for the curlew’s sake
as it floats above

 

the bogland scrub, nesting
easily amongst the rub
of tussock on moor, hay

 

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Black serif on the H of a TV aerial,
side-on pharaonic hieroglyph
in the flat light of a sullen steel sky,
the crow scouts for the giant oak clan,
watches through hedges, bends eyes
round corners, registers danger,
pinpoints food.

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Rain falls. The road ignores me still. Cars slow and pass
like mighty insects scuttling from the light.
I did not know the place, or why
they left me there, their passenger
to God Knows Where
thrown out to die.

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It seems that the Sun’s reins have been lengthened,
Allowing it more time in the sky above us all.
I notice this as I walk along my local riverbank.

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