The Yellowhammer

Working, tumbling, doddering face of war,

Fog overruns without thunder a taut shire.

Deft and cynical mercenary winds

Inform the slewing grey, the errant wheels

Into intrigue upon browbeaten hills.

Age trickles from the docile lines of lands.

Colours grovel, the soused logos of the sun

Lisps a last word from sallow wash and glimmer.

Cloud-structures of reason crumble without sound.

It is the song, the footfall of the yellowhammer

Will not give ground

To earth, sky, day, and night crouching as one.

To know the ancient ritual brotherhood

Of light dispersed and sucked up piecemeal, dumb,

This is the grey rat nibbling at the soul:

For all that urgent blood,

Communiqué of the hammer-heart of God,

Flooding the wizened limb

Would leap past time, go spangling into truce

With snowfall, small hour, toss the ultimate news

To frontal dawn from tiny corpuscle.

Plasma in chains, here no veins intersect.

—It is the heel of summer,

It is the song, the footfall of the yellowhammer,

Leaps of a sudden past the intellect.

Fog-satellite, the street-lamp can but tell

Petty parables of the heretical will

Of power as conqueror: every yard’s a swarm

Of furious atoms, bloodless, directionless,

At one another’s throats in helpless harm.

We have known sober clouds run mad as this,

But sometimes the steep groan, steel-blue claws of search

And agony hither and thither scratched at earth,

Frantic to clutch the centre and the form—

Such fossicking could only end in death.

Outline of fog has no objective, clamour.

It is the song, the footfall of the yellowhammer

Continues on the march.

Wraiths of derelict cattle in a row

Moon round this muffled loiterer of a tree,

We never saw him so forlorn as now,

Arms asprawl to hostile nothing, creak and stammer

Pandering windward, off the living map.

It is the song, the footfall of the yellowhammer

Suggests trim elderly green, flagon of sap;

Yes, it is true

Even of such a ransacked fogey tree:

Worlds back, life cooked his supper zealously

And breasted him for certain hours with blue.