Glen Wilson

Buzzards over Levaghery

A buzzard, not peregrine or sparrow-hawk
moves amongst a decimated line of trees

that form precarious perch and I tense there,
with her, with vicarious eye. We watch.

Her mate approaches, a portent that essays
over the flood plain of the Bann.

He cuts the high air as some Yeatsian dark, the full
force of everything behind him at his command.

But his arrival is interrupted, harried from its endgame
by three blackbirds in concert, their crude cacophony

and furze-fury ferry him to the west, they have
recognised the danger early in their corvid blood,

how soon they could be seen as his prey, as easy
as weeds and nettles creep further up the field.

Tired of their minor violence he soars to a speck,
the blackbirds land to brag their prowess

as they check their wings on my back fence.
The buzzard on the branch is alone with thoughts,

ever-watchful for her love to come back
in another pass, in another direction.



Foxholes
For Adrian

You wrote as if you knew all things,
your body shook as if in a rush to tell us
yet you sieved them out a line at a time,

as if we could not handle their alchemy
all at once, scouting ahead as you did, blinded
by the sun, you took what you saw to the dark.

No one should see the span of their life
revealed ahead of time, though with eyes
wide with ash, I think you had.

Yet you dug like you could always know more,
words like marrow-gnawed bones skittle
near the entrance of deep underground tunnels.

I will find you in there, in a forgotten recess,
ready to pierce our downy hubris, to maul
our clever sentences with savage necessity,

all the while pulsing with your vulpine blood,
your pages ruptured with prophecy
in a language you gave your life to earn.




In a Night Forest
After Mary Oliver

She watches an owl,
full from feasting on a mouse
that was not loved.

A fox with teeth painted red
remembers the kill as he races the night
to the approaching dawn.

Nightjars find the right leaves
to camouflage themselves,
rising only to hunt.

A badger tries to warm his sett,
his partner having not returned
from foraging across the main road.

And the watcher she cannot sleep,
this empath of the wild
or perhaps does not want to sleep,

in case her dreams have no heft
for all life becomes recollections,
and their weight is eternal,

held in the claws, the paws
and temporal mouths
of a wooded dark.




Glen Wilson is a multi-award winning Poet from Portadown. He won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing in 2017, the Jonathan Swift Creative Writing Award in 2018 and The Trim Poetry competition in 2019.
His poetry collection “An Experience on the Tongue” is out now with Doire Press.

https://glenwilsonpoetry.wordpress.com/

Twitter @glenhswilson

https://www.doirepress.com/bookstore/poetry/