Winter: the Life of Birds and the Love of God

Several years ago I bought a small book on the life cycle of birds but only got round to reading it in 2011. It was a revelation as to the harsh life of these creatures we tend to think of as cheery 'feathered songsters'. Most birds can live in captivity - fed, watered and warm - for ten to twenty years or more; in the wild nearly all are dead within two years. I have paid close attention to birds ever since and they often feature in my poems. The book also set me thinking on the true conditions of existence for all creatures - including man once he is beyond the protective bubble of industrial civilisation - and therefore the true nature of what we call the love of God. These are also themes which have concerned me in further poems.

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An iron, fissured sky, laden and chill,
Crowds the frozen crowns of the beech trees, stark
With morning frost, whilst a knuckled tendril
Of ivy roots in the famished mulch, ice-dark.

Greenfinch, dazed by the harsh shove of the wind,        

Hunch among branches, greedily scanning
The ice-clutched ground for withered husks or rind,
Frantic to staunch their hunger until evening.

In the blanched, frosty leaf-trash among shrubs

A finch, puffed, big-eyed against the cold, falls;
In a single spasm it dies. Fox cubs
Under the moon will wolf it with spiteful calls.

The autochthonic bulk of the wind grips

The beech crowns, rocking them into wheezing
Arabesques. The finches plunge with the dips
And rise, clinging with bloodless claws to the freezing

Branches. It has been like this immeasurably:

The birds feeding and dying, breeding, drawn
To the high trees and inconsolably
Suffering. After long hours the wind’s brawn

Drove off the cloud and a perishing blue

Sky highlighted each pugnacious finch, discrete,
Unique, starving, the indomitable clue
Of being; this solidity which cannot cheat          

Itself, fulfilled in sorrow: the ice-stiff sod,

The wind, the birds – this is the love of God.

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© February 2012