This one came right down to the wire and at one point we thought it might be a draw but Rizwan Akhtar’s ‘Birds’ just edged ahead to be Pick of the Month for July 2017.* What caught voters’ attention was the imagery, the allusions and the wonderful use of language. And, as one said, ‘Nature breathes in this poem.’
Rizwan works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan. He completed his PhD in postcolonial literature from the University of Essex, UK in 2013. He has published poems in well-established poetry magazines in the UK, Wales, US, India, Canada, and New Zealand. He has also done a 5 weeks workshop on poetry with Derek Walcott at the University of Essex in 2010.
Birds
for you
They scrape and bill for answers
I peck evenings for small words
finches and robins temper tones
They don’t flutter against my desires
Or rise from foggy halos
like sentences blurring intentions
only stare my doubts with little eyes
over ponds of petaled flowers
carrying conviction under feathers
a stripped choir of town’s winter
land on raven craggy earth
sank in scrimped necks
a milky whiteness of nude bodies—
clamp beaks against an urgent silence
of blue, red, and magenta quills
These birds I see cloister you
huddle like expressions
muted by long flights
They drop our histories
tied to footnotes, on vague wings.
********
Voters comments included:-
[It] awakens the romantic and philosophic eye of any literalist who has so far been looking at birds as only biological beings. It’s a ‘love at first sight’ experience reading this poem.
Imagery is from day to day examples, easy to understand yet impregnate with deeper contexts.
Fascinating fabrication of words
Because the words are so powerful they strike with intensity and the imagery is also very provocative!
Good control of the language and line length. Surprising imagery.
Fascinating and marvellous piece of writing
Language and style impressed me
The marvelous use of language to communicate the subject
Loved the theme, the message. Wonderful
The poem resounds [with] an intimacy with nature, creatural…
*It was such a close thing (one vote!), however, that special mention must go to Andrew Turner and his fine poem ‘The wolves were not invited’; its fairytale quality and unnerving ending appealed to many.