This is for you, little moorhen,
with your tick-tack, tick-tock bobbing head,
red-splashed with worry; anxious, darting;
pulling your world into some sort of battered shape
and building, building still - in hope and faith and fear.
In the most ridiculous places.
A nest on a log jam.
A nest below high water.
A nest near that hole, that sinister hole, in the bank.
Oh little thing.
Tick-tack, tick-tock, I understand.
It’s time, this time that gears your running steps,
your scuttling awkwardness, your jerking worry;
there is no time to stand, to say: How foolish;
it would be better so.
Safer, much more beautiful.
I know, tick-tack,
tick-tock, I understand.
I can sing for you, shy mother, with your five little ones;
such blobs of eagerness, quick-silver bubbles
plopping
into wide-shining, rippled life.
Tick-tack, tick-tock, jerking your head;
if you had spectacles you’d jerk them down your bill,
you’d dab them
ineffectually
with a flustered, watery wing,
wondering whether you’d told them everything,
every cunning of the rat, every cruelty of boys,
each agony of hunger, each ache of cold,
the smell of death.
Tick-tack, tick-tock, the time is too urgent.
Anxiety jerks, fear bursts in scarlet splashes.
So much to tell, so little time to tell it.
(April, 1983)
