1 poem
Among the Others
1.
Starlings
if not God’s finger
dragged through the skin of the world.
God’s breath and flag.
The smoke from God’s skidding wheels
in droops
and puffs
and plumes.
Starlings if not
the sweat of air
as it wrestles to stop God breaking through.
2.
Sparking up in their wisteria sleeping quarters
fireflies are no match
for the enormous night falling.
Think of them instead as a treasure hoard
walled up centuries ago
and now reflecting something of the lamp
a thief has hoisted in astonishment.
3.
When the meteor struck
this cormorant skimmed away unscathed
hugging the ocean surface
then dozing on a rock for thirty million years.
Or he dived
and dried in a pose of crucifixion.
Human questions will die down soon enough.
In the permanently frosty dawn-light of his brain
that has always been perfectly clear.
Meanwhile
no singing.
Andrew Motion was the UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009 and is now Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent collection of poems is Randomly Moving Particles (2021). He lives in Baltimore