Poet's Bestiary
Attempting to hammer some live thing out of the words,
black and white, green, it hangs on the feeder.
A sentence better not to have set free, it curls
and plays dead, v on its neck, forked tongue.
●
Carelessly it leaps from home to home, rattling
Grey I may be, but I still have all my teeth.
●
No ideas, but listen, here comes Ottava
Rima, taps on a web-page, sits there waiting.
●
Between a stroke and an attack, she’s wrapped
around my arm like a blood pressure monitor.
●
In a brown study, at last words begin.
That ******* white dog squatting on our lawn.
*John Greening's Hunts: Poems 1979-2009, a selection from earlier books. His Poetry Masterclass was published this May – a complete tool-kit for reading, writing or teaching poetry. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 2008 and a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2010.