The Bell Ringers and the Slaughterhouse
This is their rehearsal night:
each pull and release a feel for time
and tone, to peal exact. All just
exercise for the biggest of days.
On these frost-glazed January nights
everything carries. Past those bells,
down Edges Lane, pigs grunt
and shove – great barrows of flesh.
Such long hours of industry –
the driver’s voices are heavy with blood
and breath. Houses are too overlooked
here, streetlights grease each window.
A Hercules churns over the estate,
a low, level red eye, blinks.
Someone else shouts – that child,
three doors down, who will not eat.
Matthew Howard lives in Norwich and works for the RSPB as a fundraiser. He is currently working on a creative and critical PhD that considers the poetry of birds. He has had poems published or forthcoming in magazines including The Rialto, The North, Poetry Salzburg Review, Stand and The Reader.