Note:- A song of transitions, perhaps. The fear of change and the fear of renouncing what you once had and thought you would never give up. Change involuntarily brings with it return, and here the ‘you’ is going back to a ‘home’ on the flight path of bird migrations. But not just any bird migration, perhaps the longest migration undertaken by any avian species, from New Zealand to Scotland (and beyond). All of this instigated by the eye and the word, two things that can cut to the quick of a person more effectively than any weapon. The other woman here digs more than her claws in. She realigns the spinal column, until nothing is felt but through her. The initial fierce fire of passionate embrace, giving way to parasitic possession, and, upon withdrawal, the dangerous potential for reignition that embers maintain. Distance is required, but at the end of such remoteness comes the need to change again, and the possibility of return, with all of the fear of pain that entails. I see two women and I know I’m not one of them. 

When you saw that kiss of hair,

Fall and unfurl

Through the length of her face,

You knew there was spite there.

Her eyes: cold scolding leather,

As brown as the rosin

Preventing horse hair from skirling.

Calculating digits that untether

The body from its sensory anchors,

The mind’s servants,

Till her nerve is all-encompassing

And you’re limpid, without rancours.

-

She despised you with just three words:

Not even nothing.

Returning home to black mistrust

And a broken nesting box for birds,

You felt adrift in a sea of ember.

A worrying woman

Recording the migratory patterns of

Bar-tailed Godwits in September.

So small a space has need for gossamer,

Ghosts and aged things;

How else to become uninhabited?

Those eyes mute a scream to a murmur.