Out by the bird hide, in the bird house of dreams,
The wing-flaps cast from memories pepper the boardwalk
And sweep out across the sand at the head of the estuary.
The sky is an invisible screen with no edges or ends;
Light hits it, and there it meanders and bends, like a morning
In a graveyard where a dirty bomb of words was thrown.
So sorry and simple to think of this now, as two rivers
Pour their hearts into the sea, how their final consonants rest
In the tail feathers of a common tern waiting for night.
Is this what it feels like in the wake of death, do the clouds
Have any kind of meaning beyond their chemical composition?
Is the ocean a metaphor of vastness and unreachable horizons?
On the bird hide door there’s a message from the warden –
We are kindly encouraged to report sightings of the following birds:
I won’t list them, but hope some escape somewhere warm.
By Lisa Matthews