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A Blackbird Feeding

Homage à Guillaume Apollinaire
A busy female blackbird of the colour
Of the piled dry grass clippings
She stands in and flings aside,
Appears to find in pecking
At the cavities she makes
Items of sustenance she
Anticipates: clever bird
That knows to search
Among dead matter
For the kind of life
That in darkness
And in rotting
Leavings has
The means
To feed
A need
To fly.
I too
Look
Among
The dead
And wasted
Things I know
For what I hope
Will bring my life
Meaning, which itself
Is a type of buoyancy
And has no certain means
Of lift into this resisting air,
But in feasting on what there is
Now living where the mouldering
Of time reduces all that is unneeded
To its essential elements and qualities
Of provision for this other taking flight.
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Harold Jones is a New Zealander, educated at Cambridge University, where he was awarded an Exhibition to read English. His poetry has been widely published in UK and NZ literary journals. He has been a prize-winner in national UK and NZ poetry competitions, and, as a lyricist, in the UK Songwriting Contest, the largest such event in the world. A selection of his work in AUP New Poets Four (Auckland University Press, 2011), drew the UK review, “this excellent poet, a kind of Ted Hughes crossed with Bukowski,” with a further selection, Curriculum Vitae (Xlibris, 2014), reviewed in NZ as “downright incredible.” His work has won the acclaim of pre-eminent critics and poets: among them, Al Alvarez, “I like the elegance and control, the drive to say something rather than just to cut a fashionable figure," and Ted Hughes, “I hear a real voice, a real movement of mind cutting through resistances.” In the US his poems appear in Merion West and VoegelinView.

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