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Birdsong

It’s about this time of the morning –
As now – the blackbirds and
The thrushes start their songs:
And one, I see, a thrush, sits
High on the slender, waving top
Of the young apple tree – as if
There were nothing better in being
Than to sing – inventing phrase
After phrase of piercing musicality.
The bright, instinctive voices define
The meaning of the moment –
The shifting and lessening traces
Of cloud – half white, half grey – and
The fragrance that follows light rain:
Loudly they proclaim the silent,
The unseen, the first stirrings of sap
Under bark, organisms shifting
In soil; above, fresh photosynthesis.
So these are calls, not of birds only,
But of all that is embodied, visual,
Pressing in its given direction –
Down, upwards, out – barely
Comprehensible in formal variety,
But united in the firm and soft
Renewal of the season, in giving
The whole of what’s asked – of us
Too -acceptance, unthought, unwilled.
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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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