Jane Routh
A millennium poem
When the leaves fell from the hawthorn
by the kitchen window, it did not look bare:
simply changed colour. The berries are so thick
this year everyone says It will be a hard winter.
A family of blackbirds inhabits this plenty -
still undivided by territorial imperative
- snatching down gobful after gobful until you’d think
they’d fall out of the air with the excess weight.
I feel like opening the window and shouting
Hey, it’s only November and there’ll be hard winter yet
as if these were creatures with the capacity
to envisage and avert future catastrophe.
Now at the month end with the wind in the north
and a real frost, all the easy fruit is gone:
a thin haze of red remains on branch ends.
A bird shifts one leg sideways along a twig,
reaches down wavering for a single haw,
lunges, overbalances and flutters back.
And the fieldfares are not yet come.
I will not feed you my food.
In my childhood garden we had one blackbird
with a white head. Even then all those years ago
everyone said White bread -
it’s been eating too much white bread
as if we were creatures with the capacity
to envisage and avert future catastrophe,
and foresee where we’d be fifty years on
for this millennium.
Page(s) 44
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