Wednesday 13 January 2016

"Nearer My God To Thee"

Fourteen bagatelles or vignettes of the life of birds. I have been fascinated for some years by the incredibly harsh life lived by our supposedly cuddly feathered friends. In fact their life is "nasty, brutish and short"; in captivity they can often survive fifteen or even twenty years; in the wild they are lucky to survive two or three. Their stoical clinging on is remarkable. I tried to put all this into a more developed poem, "Winter: the Life of Birds and the Love of God" which I posted on 31 January 2014. You can link to it here.
   The final bagatelle mentions the magnificent sea swans of Penzance; anyone who has seen them sailing imperiously along the coast and ignoring the bathers on the beach will know what good breeding is all about.

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O time-worn sparrow what’s to do?
What hides behind your glint-eyed view? 
Born and bred under the brute sky   
You are closer to God than I.    

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From nest to death in two short years,
The thrush en plein will live and die,
Yet cold and starved, for all its tears,
Knows more of life than you or I.

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Even the raucous crow knows God,
Famished daily in his black cowling;
Risking traffic for scraps in the road,
Struck by a car he went dead-bowling.

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Herring gulls crowd the roofs all night,
Drenched by rain and staggered by wind;
At dawn they launch in hungry flight,
Sailing the spaces of God’s mind.

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Balked from feeding a pigeon broods
Deep in an oak tree’s shadowed crown,  
Thirst-tormented like men on roods
As August’s clear-skied heat pours down.

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At the pond’s edge young magpies drink,
Nervous of noise and the wind’s breath;
Lusty and boastful on that brink
Their destiny is chicks and death.

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The fox lodges its bloodied teeth,
The chick fades in its ruthless mauling;  
The mother moorhen screams her grief,
Thrashing the water, calling, calling.

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Starlings feeding until they die
Scuttle the road verge like black toys;  
They rise and fall as cars go by,
Racked by needs, unknowing of joys.  

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A blackbird in the snow flew up  
And from a bush it jagged complaint;
Though empty now was winter’s cup  
Its sole choice was to feed or faint.  

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A family of jays resound
High in an aspen; the wind gushes;    
Winter done, only one, pink-gowned,
Will live, the others dead in bushes.      

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A wren, a spider in its beak,
Hid in ivy at the grave’s side;
God’s love is this: the strong and weak
Have fought for food and then have died.

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Sickly under a bramble bush,
A robin with a broken wing:
Suavely a cat will make its rush –
Christ-like there’ll be an offering.

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Spray-engulfed on the sea-blanched rocks,
The glossy shag ungainly stands,
Undeterred by the grey waves’ knocks  
And its mate’s carcass on the sands.

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The sea swans, timelessly aloof,
Divide the waters’ warp and woof,
Suffering, dying, guilelessly  
Like Adam they have glimpsed God’s eye.

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© June-September 2013