Today spent at home. This morning I listened to a play back of the second part of Helen Mort’s Radio 4 series “Mother Tongue”. This one was about the poetry of things; a German poet about midges; a Chinese poet on moving house, in 6 different boxes; and a Cuban poet – usually too rude for radio, apparently – about a baker selling his bread to wives of the neighbourhood, all of which was an admirably unsubtle allusion. These were all done in translation. It was a lovely half hour to listen to.
I was lying on my couch as I listened and said to myself, when the programme finishes, I’ll write a poem about the first everyday thing that I see:
the bird feeders
four bird feeders swing on the low branches
of the magnolia outside my window
the Perspex tubes are emptied every second day
in summer and every second day I refill them
different seeds attract different birds their own weight
pushing them down to apertures wide enough
for a beak and I wonder who tells the goldfinches
that we have niger seeds on offer again
the foliage is heavy with rain slick green
leaves tilt and allow thin pencils of run off
in winter they turn abandoned shoe leather
or purses torn open and shaken empty
doves and mice scour the ground for what
they cant reach an occasional jay crashes like a drunk
at the limit of his balance and I know
I wont need to refill the feeders until tomorrow
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