Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

« Previous item
Contents of this issue
Next item »

Andrew McNeillie

print this page

Yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella)

The first telephone we had in our house
presided in Cyclopean silence, at the foot of the stairs.
Its big dial stared at us as we passed
as if daring us to make a call. But to whom?
It had about as much use as the front room.
But unlike that soot-scented holy of holies
it was for us ahead of its time.
For some reason its mouthpiece made me
think of the dentist, or the colossal
lower mandible of a fruit-eating tropic bird
seen in the waiting-room’s National Geographic.
Listen deeply? I can still hear its silence,
waiting, and its shopdoor tinkle
as I lift the receiver from its cradle,
its seductive purring tone.

But ours was more like a clunky country girl,
with its plaited brown cable, on an
outpost farm, waiting for a call.
Until it came, I used to dream it might
resound with spring’s hedgerow and wall-top drone
where the stave of wires hummed its backing 
to a limpid lyric: the yellowhammer’s 
deil, deil, deil, deil, tak ye, curse squiggled too
on its egg in the roadside nest I knew
where the holly grew in with the hazel;
or that little bit of bread and no
cheese (the cheese sometimes omitted as
the authorities say; as if to show evolution in
process). But then there came other birds.
Deil, deil, deil, deil, tak ye.

 

Page(s) 66

Back to top