One Poem by Michael McKimm

April Saturday 2010

The blackbird calling in the tree has found a mate

and the trees themselves are sprouting leaves

and we are wearing sandals

and swinging home with shopping bags

eggs, potato bread and beers

and my parents text from the queue

to the Eurostar

excited about their new trip to the Loire

and the drug dealers swerve their souped-up

engine down the wrong-way street

and Richard from upstairs is talking out his window

about sunshine and summer and ash

and inside you put on a CD

the kind Virginian lady singing of

night-time drives and gardens

and the dandelions have come up out of the ground

and the maple tree is blossoming, the jays

are being uncharacteristic

and the drug dealers’ stash is safe in the fence

and we fry the eggs, the bread,

sit at the table where the light comes through

the slatted blinds

and down the road the blackbird is calling out a new tune

and there is nothing in the sky

for the first time in my life

but space and air and big bold perfect blue.

===

Michael McKimm is from the Giant's Causeway, Northern Ireland. He graduated from the Warwick Writing Programme in 2004 and won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007. His poetry has appeared in Magma, Oxford Poetry, PN Review and The Warwick Review, and Dossier Journal (New York). His first collection, Still This Need, was published by Heaventree in 2009.

John Tucker - Two Poems

Blackbird Fly


Shot 1: garden fence post.
Enter flying blackbird, lands
on post, sings octave of C, ascending:
‘don’t rape mi for so li-ttle dough’.
Flies off.

Shot 2: different garden, brick wall.
Enter flying blackbird. Lands on wall.
Sings octave of C, ascending:
‘don’t rape mi for so li-ttle dough.’
Flies off.

Shot 3: different garden. Bird-table.
Enter flying blackbird. Lands
on table. Sings octave of C, ascending
‘don’t rape mi for so li-ttle dough -
and when you do make sure it’s slow;
and now begins the Fractured Know’.
Flies off.

Shot 4: empty road. Enter hopping
blackbird, dishevelled, dragging
a sack of cash, unable to fly.
Shuffling down the road, black bird
has lost voice, sold song and soul.
Only sound now, prison chain-gang
drag of loot
in bag
on concrete pavements.



Diet Theory


Language speaks mankind. It’s full of fossils,
coins, corruptions, ossifications; dead metaphors
that the brain is built of; ghost-vowels, consonantal

masses; kaleidoscopes of colour; word-shades,
word-frequencies. It’s worth billions of pounds.
Words like soul, truth, consciousness, love,

infinity, they were sacrosanct to the Romantics;
but are they simply differences in sound
combined with homogenised differences in idea?

Words like taste, intelligence, class, time, take
them off the menu too, for vowels are our souls,
for language speaks mankind.

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (9)

Twite

[song]



Fat trills, buzz-notes, electric twitters.
The hedgerow shred from inside by scissors.
This one moving eye to watch us while we
scaled the five stiles from the Wye to Hoarwithy.

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (8)

Great Tits

[song]



high wire acrobats
of our bird feeder’s
three ring circus

clingers   climbers
ringers    rhymers

they call for teachers
for teachers

& have nothing
to learn

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (7)

Willow Tit

[song]



black cap
                  & black bib
world’s eye
                  on the wold
skids sideways
                  skywards
brightest ear
                  of the wood
listening
                  in zigzags
sounding
                  the twigs’
precision
                  xylophones

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (6)

Greenfinches
‘greenness a thousand times more green’
      —Dorothy Wordsworth

[song]



Now they are precision
      instruments
      for opening seed hearts.

Now they are jade lanterns
      on a bough -
      sweet-hearts and pair-bonds.

Now they are emerald
      lamps lit
      over the bird feeder.

Now they lime-light the branches,
      bright
      pears or goosegogs.

No green more greener
      nor no finch
      more finchier.

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (5)

Dunnock

[song]



Trust the plainest of birds
with the sweetest calls

to carry them under cover
lest they fall into the claws

of a hoopoe or golden plover.

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (4)

Chaffinch

[song]



whose call
(according to Bill Oddie)
is as a cricketer bustling up to bowl
who hurtles to the crease
then releases

                                    the
                                    ball

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (3)

Wren

[song]



        that
                ratt-

                                ling

                                        hedge
                                has   a heart
        the coppery heart—
                                        beat of bushes from
which
                                                it  bursts  the
smallest

                        god-

                send

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (2)

Long-Tailed Tit

[song]



          A nursery ball
        with a bell inside
    blown through branches
      —a bauble with a tail
         peals in its nest-
          bell of lichen.

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (1)

Earshot

Were it not for the slight upended
twite suspended below that lancing spray
of elder blossom then the light that slid
through my eye last night, that told
the twite’s call within an ear of my eye
might well, might not, might never, be remembered.

==========

David Morley directs the Warwick Writing Programme. He has published more books and won more prizes than we could possibly list here, but his poetry collections include Scientific Papers and The Invisible Kings (both with Carcanet), whilst in 2007 he wrote The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing. Gists and Piths will be serialising more of his bird-poems over the next few days as part of our Midlands poetry season.

Two Poems by Jane Commane

Circa

Night as rag-soaked petroleum,
the whisper of moon creaks
through the cloud’s machinery.

Something has taken a hold
that leaves you wondering
where it all began –

with milk turning thick-sour
clotted in the bottle, or the soft
gyrations of motorway noise

trapped in lobes of the landscape’s
shell-coils, or with the funeral march
tapping blind on the pipes in the wall.

Childhood rusts, counted on coat hooks
in cupboards-under-stairs, a spark caught
silently as a kiss threatens a dithering island.


Blackbird

Nightfall recast, an angler’s line
falling still into a dark plot
formed invisible –

the soft tremor of breath
sending footprints tumbling
across the lover’s sheets.

Yet the blackbird breaks a chorus
as soft as the egg-blue
spoiled on pavement

Yet the blackbird sings
in the cloud-dense lateness
and tears a hole right through

and the shivering alarm
hacks through the dead wood,
razor resonance.

The half cut moon, deepest neutral
hangs down and the strings are cut.
Illusions falter - we deserve nothing,

with our dreams full of doppelgangers,
unborn declarations, we deserve
nothing less, nothing more than this,

and at the wrong hour, pitch perfect
siren of the heartless unease -
we reset our clocks.

as the sonnet breaks itself, falls to ash,
dawn becomes a vagrant,
missing amongst the refuse of night

==

Jane Commane runs Nine Arches Press with Matt Nunn, and they also co-edit Under the Radar magazine. She is currently working on a first collection, due out in Summer 2010. She has also recently worked with visitors at the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth, and some of the resulting poems can be viewed here.

Mark Goodwin - Blackbird Stir

in my friends’ new house
in their attic between

two big brown bookshelves
randomly packed with poetry

I pass

sleep’s pages through
my head and my head’s

pillow is
a waking word

and the ajar skylight conveys air
as a bird’s opening

of song

*

at one morning now
in a corner of beak

my entire life liquid
on a blackbird’s tongue

long song-notes hold
a gloss house of sound

in the top of this voice-house
& light rhyming I sleep

I sleep between clear eaves
of soft death graceful

as one immortality’s moment

*

outside in part-light’s dim glee

outside over Sheffield’s hills
houses’ roofs flutter & flow

roofs like wings & beaks
with sleeping beneath

*

between two bookshelves
between two halves of beak
between attic roofs

I am in

a blackbird’s dream