poem

Liz Berry: First Prize Bird

When I became a bird, Lord, nothing could not stop me.

 

                  The air feathered

                                                             as I knelt

by my open window for the charm –

                                                           black on gold,

                                                      last star of the dawn.

 

Singing, they came:

                                        throstles, jenny wrens,

jack squalors swinging their anchors through the clouds.

 

                         My heart beat like a wing.

 

I shed my nightdress to the drowning arms of the dark,

my shoes to the sun’s widening mouth.

 

                                              Bared,

     I found my bones hollowing to slender pipes,

             my shoulder blades tufting down.

                    I   spread    my flight-greedy arms

to watch my fingers jewelling like ten hummingbirds,

my feet callousing to knuckly claws.

                  As my lips calcified to a hooked kiss

 

silence

 

                     then an exultation of larks filled the clouds

and, in my mother’s voice, chorused:

         Tek flight, chick, goo far fer the Winter.

 

So I left girlhood behind me like a blue egg

                                                                        and stepped off

                                           from the window ledge.

 

How light I was

 

as they lifted me up from Wren’s Nest,

bore me over the edgelands of concrete and coal.

 

I saw my grandmother waving up from her fode,

                                         looped

      the infant school and factory,

                            let the zephyrs carry me      out to the coast.

 

Lunars I flew

                                    battered and tuneless

 

       the storms turned me insideout like a fury,

there wasn’t one small part of my body didn’t blart.

 

Until I felt it at last           the rush of squall thrilling my wing

                         and I knew my voice

was no longer words but song         black upon black.

 

I raised my throat to the wind

                                                      and this is what I sang…

 

 

Black Country – Standard

charm – birdsong or dawn chorus   throstle – thrush

jack squalor – swallow   fode – yard   blart – cry