Shrike

Call a harsh ‘chack’; song is a scratchy warble
catching my origins in a thicket of oak.
My passerine tact a mystery to the hawk.
A week in my wingspan is idle flit and hack;
my back’s bitter blood-bolt, the terse use of my beak
to keep my barbed-wire larder of corpses in stock.
No carrion-charmer, no falcon or red kite
I, peregrine, I pious in thought and act
am shriven in my little blood, my butcher’s reek.
In the wrack of my nest, in its bone-scree of voles and shrews
I am called to the questing retch of my home choir.
Their eyrie-cry my kyrie eleison.

Mons Horse Burial

Haunch of a 13-pounder, mud-locked. One pelvic wheel.
The barrel down-tilt, something of a horse
straddling it. At half dismount
the trooper, dirigible angel, splays his flanks.

Gingerly he’s unhooked from his embrace
and the left stirrup. The gun-horse —
mane down over its confusion
of muzzles — maintains dressage balance

and poses the usual problem for the Detail.
Steak-stripped since the shell burst,
the last consummation’s been had of it.
There’s no petrol, a wood fire won’t take.

Even clay, after some debate, and much
struggle toward the ditch, rejects its frame.
A week of repeat salvos — the parapet’s
weak soil flensed to an equine shrapnel.

In Clitheroe Keep (1)

The point was still to hold the pass, control
the pack-horses’ route over the Pennines

— thus, Clitheroe. Up on its hill-spur. Small
infringement, herald of a bad time

like the taxman’s strongbox on arrival
slung above the stirrups, half a wind chime.

a bright wind, marching east for Pendle hill;
a sinew below its heather-coat of mail.

Clitheroe. A rest home, heroes in choky,
the climate and recline of locked-up kings

bookmarked as if bored by their own stories.
Clitheroe in air, spring’s chilblain kind

or callous devils, cast in the scitter-tourney
or called time hourly to its witching song

a bright wind-marching, east for Pendle hill;
a sinew below its heather-coat of mail

the slick hauberk of rain and a Lancs. postcode,
the box of weather, a clear fill and reload

barely keepsake by the re-pointing of stones,
by wind, by everything else that’s just coming, just gone.

In Clitheroe Keep (2)

All wars are civil wars.
And so too, Lancashire
shared that before-diaspora

parcelling of the family:
the Whalleys of Whalley,
Foulridge, Bolton-By-

Bowland, its wet trough
gurgling suns. The troth
lines that the wind cuffs

from the headstones there:
my grandmother’s grandmother
and the stillborn child with her.

Clitheroe re-runs our kid’s old news:
who’s kept it up, who’s moved
away, and on. Time’s groove

like the dent left on your side
of the double bed; one line —
Ribble, Mons, Irrawaddy, Rhine.

You think always in foreign
English, the uncomforting
syllables lost to the tongue.

It is true Rupert’s cavaliers
and the prince himself gazetted here
en route to Marston Moor.

In Clitheroe Keep he barracked.