Wendy Videlock: The Owl

Beneath her nest,

a shrew's head,

a finch's beak

and the bones

of a quail attest

the owl devours

the hour,   

and disregards   

the rest.

Published 2009. A kind of Walter de la Mare-ish nursery rhyme feel - or an almost nighmarish jingle on nature's ruthlessness.

Cliff Ashby: Spring

Thank God for
The dispassionate Sun,
Birds that mate
In magnificent trees,
Water fowl
That splash down
On a cheerful river.

Say a prayer
For the squirrel
And the cock pheasant
Disappearing into the orchard.

Let’s hear it for
The humble lark
And linnet,
The flamboyant magpie,
Children on swings,
Old men warming chilled bones
And the simple who
Make no complaint.

Hurrah for
The tiny flowers
For which I have no name,
Discovered in odd corners,
The cuckoo, still to come,
Whitethroat, swift and swallow,
And yours truly
Sitting in the sun,
Wondering where the hell
The next poem’s coming from.

Ashby’s publisher notes that “Towards the end of his long life [he died in 2012 aged 92] he spent much time watching birds on the feeder outside his window.” Not a bad ending.

Micheline Maylor: Bird at the University

Four months, it takes, for the sinew

to release bones from skeleton.

A whole semester.

From August, I walk back and forth past the bird

one hundred and twenty-two times.

I think of me and you, us,

while this elegant architecture called bird

disintegrates.

He’s belly-up, beak to the north,

wings splayed to the poles.

In two days, his eyes are sockets,

in four days, his under-feathers scatter to the east.

The gentle wind detonates

a downy bomb on still, green grass

only a few stray flight-feathers cling to the skeleton

in the mud beside the late pansies.

November snow covers everything.

Stray footprints press him tighter to the earth.

Much exists in my lexicon that was not there yesterday,

last week, last month, last year.

In this new normal, grief accumulates

with that first rime

with that first staying snow.

Yet, like the bird,

I learn to relax,

wings open,

to all these elements.

Published 2010. Maylor became Calgary's poet laureate this year. The poem itself acts out the "learning to relax" at its conclusion.

Maxwell Bodenheim: Advice to a Hornèd Toad

Hornèd Toad of cloven brown,

Rock souls have dwindled to your eyes

And thrown a splintered end upon your blood.

Night and day have vanished

To you, who squat and watch

Years loosen one sand grain until

Its fall becomes your moment.

Tall things plunge over you,

Slashing your dreams with motion

That holds the death of all they seek,

But you, to whom fierce winds are ripples,

Do not move lest you lose the taste of stillness.

Hornèd Toad of cloven brown,

Never hop from your grey rock crevice

Mute with interwoven beginnings and ends.

The fluid lies of motion

Leave no remembrance behind.

From Advice (1920), the second of Bodenheim’s many collections. Like a Beat Generation poem decades before its time, it stumbles roaring from image to windy image, and every so often a line of real strength rises out of the punch-drunk miasma: “Rock souls have dwindled to your eyes”. Bodenheim’s life pretty much defined the saddest side of Bohemia.

Shivani Sivagurunathan: Bees

Bees froth above the surface,

their ancient porridge in-made, a

sign they are to crack out of

stripes, pearl shut-ins, the mono-

diurnal churn and flit.

Two bees, or are there ten?

You count, re-name,

every kiss is a doubt of bees,

rabid roadside dogs they are,

angular in the sunlight from

my womb,

phosphorous, decent light

for their curdle, albumen,

epileptical knowledge—when do

ceilings drip confessional bees,

perhaps dying, perhaps soldiers?

These days. To look up is to

ponder the spectrum of

bloat and ash, swoop and

soar, lumps of their zeal,

and forever now, we shan’t

return home where the

metal kettle waits

to mimic a typhoon, the stand

fan the kettle’s accomplice,

no more while above us

birth licks the encasement of insects.

All long night they threaten to

stop.  

We slip into touch, between

the imperfect harmonies scattered

in our air,

we meet them, the bearers

of voyaging milk, piqued.

Published 2012. Beneath the lucubrated vocabulary are some likeable pictures of a surreally domesticated natural world (“the bearers of voyaging milk”).