James McGonigal: The Camphill Wren
The Camphill Wren
For days I've come back to the wren
that takes flight from my doorstep
or fossicks in honeysuckle for spiders.
Tonight it escapes me again
to merge with dead leaves in the hedgefoot.
'Ah,' my ornithological Irish friend
concurs, expert in fauna and verses,
'The wren is not an easy bird to start
a poem on.' Its wing beats
sweep the doorstep empty as a heart.
As I stepped out one summer morning
with thoughts of our grandchild awake in France,
a spool unravelled just at the height
of this hand where she fed before - wrens
part from honeysuckle as carelessly as that,
each having taken its fill and turned
small as a leaf in the dry hedgefoot.
Once-in-a-decade sightings
made me think that the wren was declining -
but no, Gerry says: only for years I've had my eye
on other things.
-
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This annual anthology publishes Scottish poetry, fiction and drama. Its aim is to include both established writers as well as up-and-coming and even unknown ones.
Born in Dumfries in 1947, and brought up there and in Glasgow, James McGonigal taught English in secondary schools before working in teacher education. He has published poetry and prose for adults and children (in both English and Scots language), and co-edited several anthologies of contemporary writing in the New Writing Scotland series in the 1990s. His poetry and translations have been published since the 1970s and some are collected in Driven Home (Mariscat Press, 1998) and in the tri-lingual long poem in English, Scots and Irish Gaelic, Passage/An Pasaiste, (Mariscat Press, 2004). His work has won awards in Scotland and Ireland.
The Camphill Wren by James McGonigal is featured in Queen of the Sheep
