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

For forty years I’ve been aware he’s had them,
latterly even mentioned it from time to time
during our formulaic phone calls, every
couple of weeks, surface chat between generations,
thinking that we might find some way

to validate this nineteenth century habit of his,
when one day he catches me, suddenly says:
“Would you like the eggs? Could you use them
at school, maybe?” The wild birds whose nests
he showed me four decades ago, magical expeditions

for a kid, to lost places miles away, the long-gone
pond near Peake’s Tunnel, Weelsby Woods,
Lincolnshire’s tangled hedges and airy shingle banks.
His diary from earlier still: Sunday
April 13th 1941: Found a Waterhen’s on Pond

near Gowt House - 3 in - took 1 - Bird on.
A few pages on, my spidery script, aged 9, fountain pen,
in the back of that same hardback notebook:
Sunday 5th April 1959: Found Waterhen’s in hedge
over pond at end of Springfield. 6 in. Took 1.

He explained the rules. Initiation. You’d take an egg,
but only if there were two or more, because birds can’t count.
He knew from species and calendar if they’d lay again.
Back home, he showed me how to blow eggs
with a skilled needle, vouchsafed the jargon,

told me “bubbed” meant addled. In Norfolk
I saw him palm that tern’s egg from the reserve,
knew he knew. And I grew away,
couldn’t square his genuine interest in birds,
his countryman’s lore, with these thefts,

these sawdust-bedded cardboard boxes.
I’d open one, and below each uniquely
patterned oval was a neat handwritten card,
a reduction, cold facts. What was he gaining
when he slipped that moorhen’s egg in his jacket

along Mucky Lane at Covenham, when
he climbed down the tree with the jackdaw’s
pure blue egg in his mouth for safety?
I taped his memories, loved doing so,
capturing his vivid recall of the rural thirties.

By then our secret had accumulated
a drift of dust on top of his wardrobe for decades,
into the time when he’d become a watcher
of birds, endlessly intrigued by their behaviour.
Yet he didn’t make wider connections,

was happy with a mown lawn and concrete,
thought environmental protesters should get a job,
railed against French farmers, well, the French per se,
though he’d never seen their easy countryside,
and all the while I’m thinking, Dad, surely

you’re too sharp to believe this stuff.
One of the good guys, he was always
just a lad, even when I stood gaping
as he scooped the mottled egg from the shingle
under my young eyes on Scolt Head Island.

Decades on, the legacy finally passes to me.
I want to make the best I can of a technically
illegal inheritance, so I think I’ll take it
to Weston Park Museum, plead for mitigation,
at least add to their reference collection.

Then I open the boxes. He’s changed the labels:
the dates and locations are gone; even as
possible science these shells of yellowhammers
and water rails which were never born, are worthless.
You daft bugger, I think, why didn’t

you talk to me about this. I see him, this
virtual stranger who is some part of half of me,
sense how he’s been wrestling with it,
not knowing what to do with his shady hobby,
has, in his awkward attempt to move it on,

given this minor collection anonymity.
And I’m on barbed wire, strung out between his
ancient obsession and the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981,
boxes of eggs with no provenance, contraband,
somewhere between trainspotting and a stash of dope.