The murmur

You carry it in on your palm-stretcher,
a brittle-spit, a kicked-out life-in-a-stick,

all stuttering beak and shattered spindle,
like a rickety doll’s-house staircase.

You order an ornamental cage
for its fortunate incarceration

so it can continually see your face
as a cherub constantly beholds God.

Safe, it muddies our pool, divides our nation,
sprays our stippled wallpaper with feces,

dive-bombs foreheads, pecks at sockets,
with a maddened look in its tetchy eye.

You feed it dead mosquitoes;
my ears are boxed to its vexed chacker.

It crashes into metal bars. From a cloud,
a congregation, I hear you murmur,

You have no empathy for the bird.

(First published in Psaltery & Lyre, 14 January 2019)