Avocet
You look like a bird making the best
of a bad situation – someone stole
your legs and replaced them with
a pair of blue-grey stilts that seem
to have autonomy. A gust of wind
buffets white feathers and you teeter
but hold your balance, inclining
your head to the water.
That upturned bill you use to scythe
the surface in wide arcs, has exotic
elegance that looks amiss among
these redshanks and shelducks,
more akin to the sacred ibis.
So I picture you in antiquity, wading
beside the slave barge of a pharaoh,
a hieroglyph made manifest.
Sean Magnus Martin won the 2015 Battered Moons poetry competition. He was also published in Bath Spa University’s 2017 MA anthology, Plume. His first pamphlet Flood-Junk will be released with Against the Grain Press in May 2018