Lost Species poem 13: Chris Waters

The latest poet in this series is Chris Waters. The natural world is his frequent subject and this poem, like many of his, has a distinctive style and loses nothing to its brevity.


In the Midst of the Sixth Great Extinction
 
All of John Clare’s birds – Fern-Owl and Starnel,
Chiffchaff, Corncrake, Pettichap, Pewit,
Bumbarrell, Snipe, Quail – all of them,
overnight, in moonshadow, while elsewhere
we lay dreaming, upped, just upped, took wing
from his poems, leaving not an echo
or a fallen feather on their page, leaving
redacted lines like a stripped winter hedge
holed with black spaces, with windswept nests
where nothing now glabbered or chelped.


© Chris Waters


https://www.amazon.co.uk/Christopher-Waters/e/B003JB2CIK