Brood
The pigeon is nesting in the hawthorn.
If I lift my eyes from the lap top screen
I can see her sitting on a mess of sticks.
She watches me closely, cocks her head,
as if the sound of the keys were visible,
small fears to put her on the edge of flight.
She sits whilst I sit, whilst the rain falls,
she sits through cold brightness, the dark.
Out there a clutch of the future warms
under the press and nestle of feathers.
The hours heat my lap, word by word,
as my fingers peck. She waits it out,
I type on, both of us tuned for a crack,
the moment when something opens.
*Andrea Porter’s collection A Season of Small Insanities is published by Salt. She is also a member of The Joy of Six Poetry group. She has completed one novel and is up to her eyes in the next.
To Melissa Who Complains about Being the Youngest
They say the blossoms are more beautiful this year
because, though winter dragged, a slow spring saved them from
the frost. Like you, they’d waited in the dark so long
perhaps they doubted that their cue would ever come.
But look at you now, half grown, playing in the sun,
rampant in this tree where our bright blooms celebrate
the light in pinkly fat profusion. So. Now you're here
and every blossom too, though all of you came late:
more loved for being born at last, and worth the wait.
*Jacqueline Saphra's pamphlet, Rock'n'Roll Mamma was published by Flarestack. Her first full collection, The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions, developed with funding from the Arts Council of England, will be out from flipped eye in Summer 2011.
