Big hands, big thumbs, broad workaday hands
Darkened with working the land
Kneading the contours, squeezing out rats and rabbits.
Most of the day elongates a telephone pole
With his lighthouse lookout and swivel noddle.
O beggared eagle! O down-and-out falcon!
Mooning and ambling along hedgerow levels,
Forbidden the sun’s glittering ascent –
As if you were sentenced to pick blackberries
At Easter, searching so fearful-careful,
So hopeless-careless, rag-wings, ragged trousers.
Too low-born for the peregrine’s trapeze, too dopey
For the sparrowhawk’s jet controls –
Where’s the high dream when you rode circles
Mewing near the sun
Into your mirror-self – something unearthly
Lowering from heaven towards you?
Buzzard sits in mid-field, in mild sunlight,
Listening to tangled tales, by mole and by bee,
And by soft-headed dandelion.
When he treads, by chance, on a baby rabbit
He looks like an old woman
Trying to get her knickers off.
In the end he lumbers away
To find some other buzzard, maybe older,
To show him how.