Three poems
You watch a woman walking
on a street with small
tight steps that give nothing
away
and get nowhere
she is trying
to get somewhere but
she won’t
not like that
Where does it go?
Where does that
pavement
go, that she is walking
on, walking on with her
small
steps.
There are new flowers
that have pushed through
the soil with
small shoots, as if from
nowhere they have got up
and out
Things go in the ground
they go down in the mud and mush
old time makes new time.
Things are green
Soon there will be frogs
You laugh out loud
The world is young yet.
Chicks
I watched the mother fly from the nest
stuttering under her young’s weight
she got no further than
the length of a lying man
before she had to dump the
headless mess of half grown feathers.
The first’s head was clipped off
by a dinosaur’s snapping beak black
and white jabbering up to the sky
forced down its gnashing gullet.
Soon another came out
I didn’t see it carried, but I found it
not far from the first now buried
with a small clay coloured slug
oozing on its eye
the pin pricked pink of its bare belly
cold and firm in the mud.
A pet cat came and sniffed
The third seems unharmed
and will become stronger now
for this intrusion.
The Robin
The robin watches me while I dig
he watches me with his shiny black eye
side on not blinking
waiting keen and quiet
for me to turn up worms
and the small things that live
in the soil and scutter
and twitch in his sharp beak
I being a large mammal
who shifts and
shunts the earth around
once, I slice open
a perfect hole, one part
of a tunnel now collapsed on
the heap of what I have dug
the earth is dry and grainy and slips down itself
Dad comes to look at the trench
and to level it
he kneels and with one hand
paws through the loose earth like
he is swirling hot water
around a bath
I watch him move the earth
I will not lay the wall until he says it is time.
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