You begin with a design:
the artist’s strokes
a kind of preening that elicits
frictive glosses from your close-up wings.
Whoever drew you also caged you,
this freehand desert-colour time-box
partly pinkish, like your eggshells.
Through a set of lilac lines,
and dawn, and dusk,
you look sideways.
Sweet, invasive and entirely silenced thing,
I’ve company to place beside you –
not yet.
Passerine bird,
in your passage from Persian to English
you’re no longer a nightingale, though you’ll warble
and curl your toes.
While you perch,
I’m minded to bring you a tree and a night
and a song to be yours: the memorable one
flung out by your namesake from a moonstruck twig
that time our deaths were forecast on the news
so we went for a walk, and rested in you
our everything lyrical forever.
