Goldfinches

Minting each new dawn

The scattering currency

Of innocent gold

Sowerby''s Beaked Whale

Conjured from the deep

Washed onto an alien beach

Your mystery intact

We know so little:

Named two hundred years ago 

Remained in darkness 

:

For millennia

Minds its own perfect business

Breaks cover to die

--

Pterosaur 

Vast leathery wings
That challenged Leonardo -

Sinew, skin and bone -

Evolving answers -

Hollow structures, skinny strength,

Canny reading air -

Quetzalcoatlus!

Greatest shadow cast from high -

Ranging majesty

 

The Olm

All over the world

Pale denizens in caves survive

Slowly losing eyes,

Legs, hope, habitat - 

The olm becoming legend

Embodies stubborn life

Whimbrel

Arrived from far  south 

As snow goes the male displays

The nest’s a scrape

A month’s incubating

They share, and both care for them

Summer’s long six weeks

Then the parents leave!

Later, the fledglings migrate

With lonely instinct 

Yet, drifting over fells

The rippling call of genius,

The haunting soundscape

The bubbling echoes of Elysium

-

Blue Whale

On planet Ocean

What overwhelms the judgment:

Not how vast, how much at home, 

How utterly complete you are:

It is the mystery in your brain,

The traffic we may never know,

What the universe whispers in the tongues of space,

What peace it is that passes understanding,

What patterns you translate from sky to deep to sky,

The thought of the thoughts,

The art your thought embodies,

That utter unfathomability 

Reflected in the ocean of the sky

Sun Birds

Failed hummingbirds?

Could one say that of birds so

Utterly gorgeous?

But no ho\vering !

Large and clumsy feet that grip

Beaks that drill sideways

Where tongues cannot reach

Sharp metallic calls, distinct.

Spider-hunters drab - why?

Mysteries surround them

Yet they are there, triumphant !

 Sunbirds of Africa, beyond !

--

Hornbill

Her nest a citadel

Immured in safety, in trust

She sits on her eggs

He guards and feeds her

Later she breaks out: the young

Feed through the cell door

 

The Oil Bird

Perfect troglodyte!

Roosts in total darkness:

Large eyes defeated -

Echolocation!

Night forays, swallows fruit whole

Digests in cave, safe

Babies fattened -oil!

Their sad destiny so named

By rapacious humans

The adults, elegant

Of wing and tail- the reason?

Because, yes, because...

 

May Coronations - London and Tamworth NH 2023

How paltry a thing

To crown  a human king !

Minions flash the red and gold

Joyful music, awe is sold

Stories past, an empire told

Weaving priests and soldiers bold

Centuries of rituals hold

Echoes die in vaulting cold

Keep the subjects in the fold

Let us rather crown our Queen!

One spring morning

Chilly, greening,

Here In Tamworth guests assembling:

A single persistent drumming grouse

A bear stirs somewhere in the woods

Four high geese, mournful, skeining

Ten goldfinches flocking

A hundred thousand violets on their usual bank

A million fiddleheads unwinding

Untold multitudes of leaves a-budding

And  bearer of the cynosure

The jewel of jewels

There in the centre of the crown

The ruby-throated humming bird

Arrived on time from southern clime!

So let us celebrate our Queen!

Queen  and mother, Nature, Self

Sphere of fire and water,

Ring of rock and sky

Throne her stone of destiny

Cast the circles rippling out

Break the winter’s icy hold

Hold Her in Her warm embrace

Makes us agents, makes us free

God save our gracious Queen!

God save our noble Queen!

God save The Queen!

The winding spirit of the sun

The guiding hand through darkest night

Our dawn, our noon, our murmuring day

Vivet regina ! Vivat!

Vivat in aeturno!

Seculorum secula!

Ever and forever

Chorus swelling, life upwelling!

Ever and forever

Fragile resurrecting Earth 

Gaia living, without end.

D.H.Lawrence - the Whales

They  say the sea is cold, but the sea contains 
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent. 

All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge 
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs. 
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers 
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea! 

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages 
on the depths of the seven seas, 
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight 
and in the tropics tremble they with love 
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods. 
Then the great bull lies up against his bride 
in the blue deep of the sea 

as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life: 
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale blood 
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and comes to rest 
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's fathomless body. 

And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the wonder of whales 
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and forth, 
keep passing archangels of bliss 
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim 
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea 
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies. 
And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young 
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end. 

And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring 
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood 
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat 
encircling their huddled monsters of love. 
and all this happiness in the sea, in the salt 
where God is also love, but without words: 
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales 
most happy, happy she! 

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin 
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea 
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males 
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea. 

The Fish

Elizabeth Bishop - 1911-1979

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

Hawk Roosting I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat. The convenience of the high trees! The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray Are of advantage to me; And the earth's face upward for my inspection. My feet are locked upon the rough bark. It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly - I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads - The allotment of death. For the one path of my flight is direct Through the bones of the living. No arguments assert my right: The sun is behind me. Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this. Ted Hughes

The Windhover

Gerard Manley Hopkins - 1844-1889

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-  

  dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding  

  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding  

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing  

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

  As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding  

  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding  

Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!  

  

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here  

  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!  

  

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion  

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, 

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion. --

(The name is an old one for the Kestrel)