THE BLACK SHOULDERED KITE

The black shouldered kite

Shakes his silver pinioned wings

And does what he has to do

Which is hover,

Then change position,

Slip-slide, ride the wind

And hover again;

Like a feathered helicopter

Over this scrappy, scrubby field.

The black shouldered kite’s red eyes

Know no pity and see through concealments,

To detect the urine traces of

Scurrying mice and voles

Which better had, scurry like mad,

For now the black shouldered kite is god here

And god is not love,

But a grey feathered raptor,

Which wants its dinner

And will feast on saint or sinner.

It will fold its slender wings and drop,

To spear you on sharp-clawed talons,

Carry you to the top of a telegraph pole

And eviscerate you.

The black shouldered kite

Don’t take no shite.

VULTURES

In Spain at Monfrague

Three hundred vultures live on a crag.

I have seen them with my own eyes.

They have seen me and ignored me,

A fat man who gets out of a van and

Gapes up in awe.

Some sit on ledges,

Some perch on edges,

And let go, to fall,

Spreadwings and soar.

They may circle and glide,

Find a thermal to ride’

In spirals and gyres

Higher, higher and higher,

Silently curving, intersecting, interlacing

In a broad feathered dance in the sky

Over the Tagus gorge

Over the valleys and woods,

Up ever into pure azure

High above apes with their words.

COUSIN MARY

Cousin Mary strikes along the seafront at Seaford,

Walking into to the salt wind,

With her red hair streaming behind her.

She’s always dreaming,

So she’s dreaming again,

Of her Ireland of ancestors,

And the country of her heart,

Which is Spain.

She walks along the sea wall,

Past the Martello tower and the beach huts;

“NYAHHHHAYAHYAALLNEERAYHAY!” she shouts,

And then explains, when we ask her why,

That this was a Spanish muleteer’s cry.

Mary ate some mammoth once,

Unfrozen from Siberian ice, then cooked and sliced

At a Royal Geographical Society banquet.

Perhaps the flesh of the prehistoric pachyderm

Lets her access spatial and temporal dimensions,

Where others cannot be.

So there is Cousin Mary in a quiet English seaside town,

Calling out to other places and times,

There she is, we see her there,

But Cousin Mary is anywhere and everywhere.

SLEEPLESS

Sleepless in the airport hotel,

Where every molecule of air is tainted

By the aviation fuel that will fly me tomorrow,

Up high and far away

from the air conditioned box that

I have hired to have a throbbing headache in.

And the next night, I can’t sleep again

Although I’ve flown and travelled

To the extreme quiet of extreme Spain.

Being city bred,

I can sleep sound next to the sea,

Where ceaseless shushing waves soothe me into sleep,

Reminding me of the endless ebb and flow,

Of London traffic.

And if I wake to piss,

My anxious brain,

Does not let me sleep again

Without its usual background refrain

Of the sounds of more and more stuff

Moving from here to there,

Punctuated by sirens

And the rattle and hiss of nocturnal trains

Whereas out here on Iberian plains

I lay awake, waiting to hear

An eagle owl hoot

In the black black night.

Waiting for spring 2016

POEMS TYPED30/12/2017

Waiting for spring 2016

Seasons have all gorn wrong nah,

Down the tubes and up the spout,

We say, as we shiver in bus queues.

In midmay, there was an eatwave,

In February, young buzzard flew in,

Perched on a fruit tree in Dollis Hill,

Mewing for a mate.

Gawd knows what it thought it was going to eat;

But the crows that run the sky round here,

Came and chased it away.

Must have annoyed Gawd,

‘cause he’s been pissing on England,

For a month or so now,

Ever since the government announced a drought.

It was raining but it stops sometimes,

Perhaps Gawd goes off to drink

Ambrosia or soma or something.

Only Gawd knows why.

Then I scan the sky hopefully,

Looking for the screaming riders of the cloud road,

This is the time that they should arrive from Africa.

A day ago, as a another rolling wet gale blew in

I thought I heard one cry

But, my ears were cheating me;

So I checked the sky again and again,

Before I was really sure

That I saw what I wanted to see;

Swifts curving and swerving again,

Slicing the skies above London,

On black samurai sword wings.