We left the play early. It was the last day before the start of secondary school. Dad told me off for slapping the seats

There was a time when I took my radio
into the night wood and tuned its pyracantha
needle along the dial through noise jungles
to silent darkness at the waveband’s end.

Find yourself by the lake,
its icy membrane split by the long
arrow of a skein, reflected
flurry of wings, cries

bawling.

The terns lift as one
from the salt-pools behind the beach
– a thick undulating line

Winter soil is hard and hoar crusted,
birds peck with blunted beaks,
pushing up are the blind green pods
of what will soon be yellow daffodils,
given light and air.

We scoured the parish tip most weeks, when we were kids.
We clambered it in wellies.  Ferals, we scavenged
in the debris of the adults’ lives.

Life lines still arc round the base of each thumb
though the bulk of hand’s muscle mass

There was always, of course, the cold
– its freezing pretty fingerprints on our side of the pane.

They married in a chapel of black steel
bars, tethered up their feathers to serve as
stained glass. . .