Sparrows in the ditch
by Nicholas Messenger
[ poetry - july 09 ]
Little grizzled, little grubby sparrows!
I don't know whether I resent you or, within the meagre
compass of my magnanimity, admire you. Even now in autumn
as the shadows lengthen and the days around them shrivel,
brambles dangle from the hedgerows and the berries shine
and schools of silver-eyes weave in and out of them, and the steam
blooms like a damson when it swells away into the shadows
behind the dairy works, and the bicycle tyres fizz like soda
on the new-rinsed pavement, and it looks as if the sky distils
that blue from some less-concentrated sky so thoroughly
it saturates and crystal azure freezes in the air.
But riding by I simply didn't see you gathered
in the muddy ditch until you all took off together.
Imagine someone hurled a big flat stone
into a pool of mud, and the mud flew up in splatters.
That was you. In the mud. As if the only thing you care about
on a glorious afternoon like this is something edible
but indistinguishable from the mud. As if by some outstanding
feat of self-perfection you can go on living in beggary,
and being the diligent poor, and the only property
you possess is drab invisibility unless some panic
seizes you - you can achieve this ignoble, extraordinary
insensitivity while the world around you dandles its treats.
Can you be blessed with blindness? Or a more exacting form of sight?
