No-one feels like a slice of lemon drizzle cake
in the Discovery Centre café.
No-one wants to scan the marshes today
through tethered fieldglasses
ranged invitingly all along the window ledge.
They gulp their tea, head back to the car park.
The peregrine that hunts across the salts
on wings whose sharpened tips
would stun you to a halt, amazed on the footpath,
has killed and dismembered the kingfisher
that used to perch above the culvert, flash
blue flame along the waterway
and nothing is the same.
I tuck both hands into the pockets
of my marsh brown jacket, fumble
with a tissue as I stride past blank-eyed
World War pillboxes, head for the pebble shore.
The peregrine, air lord, fastest creature on Earth,
has killed the kingfisher, whose bright feathers
mingled sky with water.
Nothing is right
and hasn’t been, all year. Daffodils gaped open
before aconites faded, lambs were born
under hawthorn trees whose buds burst early
into February, flexing green fingers.
Trudging along the shore, I imagine Macduff
would know this woeful time.
The kingfisher is dead.
.
Alex Josephy
.