The Poets
Michael Longley

poem beginning with a line of John Clare


Poets love nature and themselves are love.
Imagine an out-of-the-way cottage
Close to dunes, the marram grass whispering
Above technicolour snails and terns' eggs,
Intelligent choughs on the roof at dawn,
At dusk whimbrels whistling down the chimney,
And outside the kitchen window that cliff
Where ravens have nested for fifty years.
Moth-and-butterfly-wing decipherers,
Counters of Connemara ponies and swans,
Along the lazybeds at the lake's edge
They materialise out of sea-mist and 
Into hawkbit haziness disappear.
One has written a lovely blackbird poem.