Notes on a Rookery Copyright © Ben Ridgeon April 2011

The rooks have a habit of
Disappearing before the blackness
Succumbs and fractures
To the fresh wound of dawn,
So that by the time dog walkers
Bustle out into the retreating waters of night,
The rooks are already pacing groggy fields-
Seed picking,
Furrow pecking,
And carrion checking in long, thorough lines.

There is something canny, practised in their aspect,
Knowing, as they, do, when to trespass
The shimmer-white lines of the motorway
To sift a confused red mess
Once taut and ordered in some creature,
And when to stand back and look both ways.

Deserted school fields play host
As they pace the echoes of children.
Sinister film noir detectives
Noting evidence at a crime scene,
Picking apart crisp packets and crippled coke cans
For some answer, some clue the sea gulls missed.

Even strung out like black rags
On some farmer's gallows,
Shot through and shattered,
They claim the dubious romance of hung highwaymen,
Swinging for sharp crimes that will
One day dull and lose their edge to cosy nostalgia.

I think of the rooks.

In the evening they return to wheel
And weave thorny black crowns
To torture the brows of trees,
Before bleeding as rivulets
Into the canopies and filling the boughs
With noisy gossip of their victories,their losses.

And I think of the Rook

The rook I had seen in the graveyard
Her wing skeletal, lewdly stripped of feathers,
Already being coughed up with ceremony
By some sharp nocturnal face no doubt.
She had made a symbol of herself,
Measuring the day's length aboard a tomb,
Mourning the half-digested sky
And shouting eulogies after a sickly winter sun.
One tongue less for the rookery goodnights,
One more nest to frost gently in the cold moonlight.