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.