POEM OF THE WEEK

Kate Potts – author of the widely acclaimed Feral – began writing this brand-new poem for The Telegraph during the first Covid lockdown of 2020. “There were no aeroplanes overhead and the roads were quiet,” she tells me.

“It seemed as if the wildlife in Hackney, where I lived, became bolder and louder in the lull. The starting point for the poem was a grey heron I saw up close up at Woodberry Down reservoir. I was thinking about wanting to get beyond the noise of projection, fantasy and myth, and view nature more honestly and respectfully. I think there’s also a straining, in the poem, towards a more honest sense of myself.” Tristram Fane Saunders

THE REAL BIRD

Not a Sunday-pink pedalo with a fibreglass, arching neck.

Not a fairground mannequin: glued-on nylon feathers, mechanical pistons

and glass eye.

Not a cursed, enchanted human daughter with sorry beak and pinned wings

or a brutal god in disguise, or a ballerina: taffeta, razor’s edge, wire.

Not one for sorrow, two for joy; no flapping omen or ghoul; not a

human ghost

migrating from the underworld; no

pecking swarm that blots the sun; not siege, nor charm

but bird: bold and tall on the

reservoir path.

There’s something you want to say.

You lift a webbed foot to scratch your oxters, your waxy feathers.

Not a honk, quack, grate, or rattle.

More like cricket’s wings in the dusk, staccato;

a blue, repeated call. I am trying to listen, listen, listen.