Give Me a Red Breast and a Song by Theodore Best

Give Me a Red Breast and a Song

I have sung down branches

to their sticky booby-traps.

Near things with bald wings

felt serenaded.

I have sung by the roundabout

in the middle of the night.

The lamplight was lamplight.

Nobody told me.

I have sung in gardens at hoses.

I have noted the cold of the flat black grass.

They say I am a territorial beast.

I have eaten from a fat-ball

hanging on a cherry tree.

Through those squares of hard air

what was watching?

I have eaten the beetle

crawling on my lookout.

A green spot’s appeared there –

shiny, like a beetle.

I have eaten a white knotted worm.

I have learnt not to turn from the whisker-claw.

They say I am a territorial beast.

Sometimes things look at me

like we belong together.

Show me a red breast

not a soft beak.

Others throw sticks at me

or screech like the whisker-claw.

All this is usable

for a nest in the wind.

I have harried green rubber in flowerbeds.

I have wrestled the edges of silver.

They say I am a territorial beast.

Though I fear the wind stopping

and a death in the dead grass,

breast upward, head downward,

neck awry,

I know only this:

that my voice is as big

as the one bush it’s filled.

One song,

and all manner of life sees a nesting place.

UEA Creative Writing Anthology 2010: Poetry (Norwich: Egg Box Publishing, 2010), 10-1.