Maggie Bevan
Unboarding the Fireplace
Together we ripped down
the landlord’s ugly
makeshift boards -
and gasped.
A secret fireplace!
Ornately worked iron,
hand-painted tiles;
possibly Victorian.
It felt like a birth:
something beautiful
for free.
But in the grate -
dead -
at the centre of our joy
we saw the bird,
which collapsed on touch:
a heap of bone and fluff
among the soot.
‘I never knew birds
had so many feathers’, I said
too quickly, as if to mask
a suddenly remembered guilt.
‘How long do you think
it’s been dead?’ I added.
‘Years of course’. A tone
so sure broke through the veneer
of your three words,
re-kindling all our buried hurt.
So together we swept up
the hearth and binned
the skeleton of the bird.
Like a dead marriage.
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