For D.M.
Your morning caller on your corkscrew willow,
herald-on-high, swaying on the tip-top branch,
purveyor and articulator of the drear backyards
and garages of the new-build housing estate,
a mad planner’s rash, built spilling-out,
in bricky flood over the salt marsh.
Trilling exultant blackbird, who,
when you buckle under baleful neighbourly
pressure to prune the tree, that looks endlessly
a free-flowing fountain;
(the only tree anywhere to be seen)
is gone.
And the morning is bare, silent, empty.
And what is a morning without song.
