Poems by Maggie Wadey

Premonition

by Maggie Wadey

From Canary Spring 2023

From Maggie’s desk in Hackney, East London, she looks across a park to the Olympic Site, where there's a sense of a big open sky and the Thames River, with its wide flat estuary, being within easy reach. In her narrow, city garden she has grey squirrels, foxes, a lot of cats, 'cockney' sparrows, crows and green parakeets.

A minatory late-winter sunset.
Undressed, the stark, lit-up bones of my silver-birch are
suddenly flamingo-pink, a transformation suggesting something
more like thought than matter, as if the tree has new ideas
about itself, flamboyant and provocative, inspired perhaps
by the unlikely sight and shrieking calls of emerald-bright parakeets
here, amongst the ash and leaning willow, thousands of miles
north of their natural habitat, suggesting other, tropical ways
of being, their presence shrinking space-time, like a window
in the mind sliding open and memory’s deep undertow
rehearsing a new colour-palette, new weather.

© Maggie Wadey

The Ecstasy of Thrushes

by Maggie Wadey

From Canary Summer 2021

Leafy tendrils trailing
sweep the crow through dapple
onto sunlit grass and there he struts, a black knight,
abusing his rights yet a most tender father, softly croaking
daddy-style advice and giving reassurance to his wife with
a sound like pebbles rolling in a bucket, plucking
thrush fledglings from their nest to lay them at her feet,
a brutal gallantry driven by envy of so much potential
musical dexterity quite beyond his own capacity.

Meanwhile, from their illegal swift-box squat,
dozens of shameless sparrows thread back and forth,
weaving a tapestry of airy paths across this narrow city garden
which, like a Lady Chapel with its ever-burning lamp,
is shadowy and flower-scented, a precious vessel lit by
the miracle of long-blooming, swoon-inducing roses where a team –
though mostly solitary – of bees work the immodest flowers
for all they’re worth and then, like courtiers, shuffle backwards,
lift off, move on, over-laden, beyond this deck-chaired semi-haven,
gated but not locked, and our minds, being human, are both
drowsing here and at the same time skidding off elsewhere,
nervous and venal as rabbits, our clocks forever tik-toking
with adolescent fear of missing out, afraid we haven’t understood
enough, that we’ve ignored the roar beyond our walls, fretful, until,
filled to the brim with sun we drown our minds and let our stress-

blown bodies float on a warm tide of blood and honey.
Now, unseen, a creature of a different order stutters into song,
piercing the air with shrill-voiced clarity, swooping low in liquid loops,
like an acrobat at practice on the wire it stalls, waits, repeats,
hesitates, until, from somewhere in the leafy ash above us
it hurls its thrilling leitmotif, the same in storm,
in lust or grief: the ecstasy of thrushes.

But we are asleep and dreaming.
The gate has long been locked
and the songbirds
practise silence.

© Maggie Wadey

The Grief of Crows

by Maggie Wadey

From Canary Spring 2022

Bully-boys in crumpled morning-dress,
black-pearl sheen of feather, shining-anvil beaks
pinched between glittering buck-shot eyes... city crows,
protection-racketeers, too confident to flap, swooping on open wings,
creaking, umbrella-black, close-helmeted vandals handing out death-threats
with every twist and roll, dive-bombing pigeons, magpies, starlings,
incredulous dog-walkers and their dogs.
Then, with a sudden uplift, they alight in the plane-tree’s crown beside their nest,
byword for resistance to the storm, their nestling’s airy home.
And there, with tender bleats and marble-rolls of mummy-calls they coax
their baby forth - just one this year – to tight-rope wobble on the roof-top ridge,
to bow with open begging beak, to crow, crow, crow.... until
its parents give the nod and down it goes to drop into that lush
and grassy place below, where, under the leaves,
the fox is waiting: silent, hidden, patient.

High above and out of sight, crow-daddy now forgoes
the comedy of strut and shuffle and family lullabies to throw off his fool’s motley
and, with repeated forward thrusts, from open beak he vomits forth
his warning: bass, harsh as a shovel-load of coal dumped on the air like
an evil prayer. Theatricals for the most part. Crows kill only the helpless,
small and weak, leaving the heroics of hunting still-pumping flesh
to a quite different order of beings.

Under the leaves the fox is waiting: silent, hidden, patient.
She knows her moment, knows the feather-plated toy is crunchy-soft,
snaps it up in razor-jaws, taken! and fleets away, the inky body helpless,
folded, flapping in her mouth. Swift, rust-coloured shadow,
like a thumb-print of dried blood, she paints the grass
and then is softly gone.

Crow blood freezes.

A cacophony of panic splits the air.
A choking fury of croaking, cawing, clacking, the crows’ dense-packed power
and fury a battering-ram against the senses; and every other alarm-call bird
makes common cause in tumbling, war-fuelled acrobatics.
All helpless against the vaporous cunning of the fox.
Vanished.

Like circles widening on water,
like the rings inside a tree that count the years, mourning is told
first in minutes, then half-hours, then hourly as the parents toll the fading bell until,
in silence, day after day their hunch-backed blackness haunts our trees.
The grief of crows.

The Hare

by Maggie Wadey

From Canary Fall 2021

A hare isn’t always in a trap
or hanging from a butcher’s hook.
It isn’t always being jugged, or stewed,
nor is it necessarily a symbol for something else,
a fairy story, or a woman gone mad. A hare isn’t
always the subject of a sketch or even a poem.
Mostly, it is itself, rare, but somewhere out there
on the hillside or in the grass beside the river,
super-vigilant, the way hares are, sleeping with its
gentle eyes wide open, a creature of that light
which falls between day and night. And the fact
that we don’t see her doesn’t mean she isn’t there -
she has no need of us to claim or name her.
Take yourself out of the picture. Leave her free
to race beyond the snare of your words.