THE BIRDS FLY FROM US

The little birds weighed nothing, made just a whirring
in my head. They split my heart like a seed.
Lifted me to the canopy of trees. My boots left earth.
I tasted leaves. Featherwise, my fingers stretched.

Up there my ears ran wild with calls as fledgling
long-tail tits sang sibling to sibling, those nest-mates
fluttering in acts of grace and clumsiness.
They were a clan, they held me in their space

and hop-flew round me where I hovered between birches.
Bird whirled past bird until one paused and eyed me.
And I saw, as if I’d known it long before, its tiny, downy,
beating heart, like a green ash fire in its side.

Oh how that fledgling teetered, balanced on its long latch tail.
It was midday, and June, and small leaves blew.
The bird still did not know what I was.
Then I breathed out ruin, and on that breath, it flew.

Published in ‘High Nowhere’ (IDP, 2023)
I was walking alone in a forest in Brittany in 2019, and found myself among young longtail tits.