I Encounter a Peacock
How I came to be sitting
in a bus shelter
next to a Peacock
in full display
was to become the least
of my worries.
Imagine how he’d be
if he were as wild
as we are not said
a little bit of me
aloud. Just a thought.
The Peacock inflated suddenly
and burst into plumage:
became an azure scourge
blocking out the sun,
bewildered at his bulk
but full of love,
an amorous ferris wheel
wobbling at the axle,
mewing a massy canticle
of his affections,
as he scrys for the one
who will drive him
into a napalm of nepturious
passions— each feather
ridiculously erect
with ‘what ifs’, whole galaxies
his virtual harem.
It was something
of a miracle
there was enough
left of me
to notice this
after his unexpected
growth spurt. Among
other things, I observed
the way his head
broke through the clouds,
grandiloquent but
hardly proud— we were
wrong about that.
James Coghill is an ecopoet currently clinging to the edge of the country by his fingertips. Most recently he has had poems published in Sidekick Books’ Lives Beyond Us and The Emma Press Anthology of Dance. He blogs about all things ecological here: https://thesolenette.wordpress.com/