Bird
Liz Berry


When I became a bird, Lord, nothing could not stop me.

              The air feathered
                                            as I knelt
by my open window for the charm —
                                           black on gold,
                                        last star of the dawn.

Singing, they came:
                             throstles, jenny wrens,
jack squalors swinging their anchors through the clouds.

              My heart beat like a wing.

I shed my nightdress to the drowning arms of the dark,
my shoes to the sun's widening mouth.

                                Bared,
   I found my bones hollowing to slender pipes,
       my shoulder blades tufting down.
             I   spread    my flight-greedy arms
to watch my fingers jewelling like ten hummingbirds,
my feet callousing to knuckly claws.
              As my lips calcified to a hooked kiss

silence

              then an exultation of larks filled the clouds
and, in my mother's voice, chorused:
        Tek flight, chick, goo far fer the winter.

So I left girlhood behind me like a blue egg
                                                    and stepped off
                               from the window ledge.

How light I was

as they lifted me up from Wren's Nest
bore me over the edgelands of concrete and coal.

I saw my grandmother waving up from her fode,
                              looped
    the infant school and factory,
                     let the zephrs carry me        out to the coast.

Lunars I flew

                      battered and tuneless

      the storms turned me inside out like a fury,
there wasn't one small part of my body didn't bawl.

Until I felt it at last        the rush of squall thrilling my wing
                  and I knew my voice
was no longer words but song        black upon black.

I raised my throat to the wind
                                      and this is what I sang...





charm birdsong or dawn chorus
jack squalor swallow
fode yard