NORMAN MacCaig packs this paean to an ordinary little bird with acute observation and charming imagery. The piece, dated December 1968, can be found in the magisterial posthumous volume of his work, The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon, £25).
SPARROW
He’s no artist.
His taste in clothes is more
dowdy that gaudy.
And his nest – that blackbird, writing
pretty scrolls on the air with the gold nib of his beak,
would call it a slum.
To stalk solitary on lawns,
to sing solitary in midnight trees,
to glide solitary over gray Atlantics –
not for him: he’s rather
a punch-up in a gutter.
He carries what learning he has
lightly – it is, in fact, based only
on the usefulness whose result
is survival. A proletarian bird.
No scholar.
But when winter soft-shoes in
and these other birds –
ballet dancers, musicians, architects –
die in the snow
And freeze to branches,
watch him happily flying
on the O-levels and A-levels
of the air.
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