Kit Wright’s perceptive eye and imaginative mind see the links between bird and man-made machine in this sample from his collection Ode to Didcot Power Station (Bloodaxe Books, 2014, £9.95).
The little poem below has the same imaginative touch.
CRANES IN THE MIDDLE DISTANCE
To Homer their cries suggested
Echoing bugle calls
Of an advancing host.
In grosser banqueting halls
They meant a not-to-be-bested,
Status-proclaiming roast.
~
Their angular V formation
Prompted the alphabet.
All dancing owes a debt
To their fluttering courtship rite,
And they move in imagination
As Plato’s shape of flight.
~
If what we have in lieu
Are outstretched necks of steel
Machines of inordinate strength,
Humanly charged they feel
As into expressionless blue
They measure their tensile length.
~
In beauty that soars and dips,
Delicate, riding, slow,
Upon the aerial flow
They pay their lines from the sky
And they seem high-masted ships
Round which the seagulls fly.
~
A LIKENESS
The long campaign is over
That ended in defeat.
The shields that flashed are darkened.
The lines are in retreat.
~
Each solider in that army
Hangs down his ruined head:
A burnt-out field of sunflowers,
The dying with the dead.
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