How the Curlew got its Curl

All the Summer, she shelters in her studio,
Under the North-sent light,
As she’s painting a curlew, a bird of the Winter,
That, like her, flees when the Sun gets bright.
She starts in April, starts from the tail-quills,
Nothing but browns and creams –
Slowly works forwards as evenings grow later,
Until she can hear its call in her dreams.

At five-times life-size, her bird is a monster,
A beautiful giant of the fens –
With every barb of every feather,
More real than in any photographer’s lens.
So unlike the shy things they are, them and her,
Avoiding the seaside crowds –
They to their moorland, her to her studio,
Waiting for the safety of the huddle’ing clouds.

By the late of May, she’s mottling the wing,
By June, she’s glinting the eye
By the height of July, she starts on the beak,
As the burning Sun is stoking-up the sky.
Inch-by-centimetre, longer and still longer,
Polished to perfection as she goes,
Longer than a godwit, longer than an avocet –
This beak is magnificent, and still its black arc grows !

All through August, she’s stretching it out
With the windows wide-open from dawn,
Bringing-in the songs of the blackbird and the goldfinch –
But the curlew cannot sing until its bill is fully-drawn.
Till finally, finally, it tapers to infinity,
Just as the September cools the air.
She locks up her studio and heads out to the marshes,
As the North-sent breezes blow the cobwebs from her hair.

This poem was inspired (but is not directly about) this painting by a friend, Anna Clare Lees-Buckley. She specialises in birds, but unlike the subject she doesn’t master in reclusivity.

Dino-Golf

A T-Rex guarded the first hole,
As we played a round by the beach –
Over the hump and round the bend
With a club and a scorecard each.
Fibreglass limestone hemmed the links
With fossil ammonites –
Were coccoliths in the little stream
To lay down chalky whites ?
Triceratops was present, of course,
And deinonychus too –
We admired her feathers as we let
Another pair play through.
The rough was an abandoned nest –
The eggs gave a tricky lie.
A pterosaur looked unimpressed
As my ball refused to fly.
The sauropod was on the small size,
Barely bigger than a car,
And the microraptor was suitably dinky,
As I came in over par.
But the twelfth showed the first sign of trouble,
With a draught through the plastic swamp
To shake the early magnolias,
As I teed-off with a whomp.
The fifteenth had a river of lava
Splitting the fairway in half –
I was so busy taking my shot, I forgot
To take a photograph.
The seventeenth was watched by several shrews,
To no concern.
They looked-on patiently as we played,
Content to wait their turn.
And then, crowning the final hole,
Was a crater upon the green –
Only a metre across, but still,
Here comes the Paleogene…
As we finished our round at the end of the world,
It felt like the nick of time –
Then back to the seagulls along the Prom,
And an ice-age ninety-nine.