Don't pound the pavement, hard and grubby.
Step away to leave behind its jarring slabs. Find
a yielding, muddy path instead.
See how an alder marks the way:
green and turning yellow, cones and catkins flower
together on a single tree.
Here are rot-proof roots, hanging on
where alarm-clock wrens punctuate the riverbank.
Kestrels in courtship overhead.
Recognise the bounds of guesswork:
marsh and willow races are, in the field, dead spit
unless you catch their voice distinct.
There’s the racket of parakeets,
brash as if they owned the place. That startled egret,
once exotic, now is everyday.
A black clamour of rooks, bare-faced
occupies the distant high-rise canopy. Shotgun
jackdaws seek refuge in numbers.
Hear woodpecker drums, trunk to trunk.
Guarded by barbed, electric fence, watch golfers float
like swans across a private lake.
iii. 2023
With thanks to fellow workshoppers from Poetry Aloud and the Kevin Higgins Faction.
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