List

Copyright: Janet Cameron

LIST

I like the sound
when soft winds play pizzicato on wing feathers
of swans in flight.

I like the songs
of sunset when starlings audition
for Aerial Idol.

 

I like the sight
of sanderlings prospecting in the shallows
like grouchy old men.

I like the fresh smell
of a new day,- the taste of sea spray
on my lips

and of you on my tongue.


(Janet Cameron, from Acumen No. 51, January, 2005)

Air Mines

AIR MINES

(A flock of swans flew into power lines in January 2003 on the Isle of Thanet. Most were electrocuted or fell to the ground and died of their wounds)

no one gets a medal for this
except perhaps the red badge of
carnage.

I saw her last Sunday
lazy on a slim stream where warblers make
song in reeds
maybe among the slaughtered who

dropped
and later died from wounds
were three who skimmed
my head as i tramped over marshes
i heard their rich vibrato
i knew them personally.

i make light, trivialise, tell myself
they're merely big white ducks
with crooked necks, and lucky
on account of an arbitary accident of
extreme beauty
not to compete with turkeys at christmas

no importance compared to the war in iraq
less newsworthy than kate winslett's diet

a flock of swan needlessly massacred
for want of a few markers
on power lines
over a kent field
in winter

(Janet Cameron from Logos 9, Spring 2004 & Equinox 9, March 2004. Highly commended in The Lady Longford Poetry Competition 2004)

The Way Throught the Woods by Rudyard Kipling

I adore this poem by Rudyard Kipling. When Kipling wrote it he wouldn't have guessed the awful change in our natural environment. It's ironic that his complaint about the road disappearing has now turned itself around. Now we complain because the roads are key, and the precious countryside is disappearing.

And wildlife is diminishing so much. When I was a kid sparrows were the most common town birds.

Their "dawn chorus" woke me each morning. There were so many little birds, so many different breeds. You needed a bird book to identify them all. Like The Observer's Book of British Birds, a little pocket-sized book that went in your anorak (when it wasn't creepy to own an anorak) to be got out the instant you spotted a bird you'd never seen before.

When I was a kid I knew the names of birds and trees and flowers. I'm so glad I had that, so glad the world was as it was for me.  So much has changed, some of it for the better, but a lot for the worst.

Copyright Janet Cameron

The Way Through the Woods, by Rudyard Kipling

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods...
But there is no road through the woods.