One falls to the forest floor clutching its chest shouting
"Aghhhhh ya...got me I'm a gonner!"
Then another and another with a more cornier
one-liner than the one before
looking more like spilled ink than the last.
Crows having a blast laughing their feathers off.
All big Film Noir fans.
"Yeah, yeah...I got it a ****** of crows!"
Across a hillside a human stands
as if he had just sprouted out of the land.
An Easter Island of a man.
The sneer of cold command upon those chiselled lips.
An Ozymandias! "Look upon my mighty words and despair!"
Or more like a granite gryphon
glaring at the crows' play turning them over in his mind
until they become words.
"Oh not that ****** Ted Hughes again!"
Crow mutters to itself.
The poet unaware that human thought
hangs frozen on the air on such days as these.
The giant Hughes man a poet made of iron
by some process of emotional osmosis
absorbs their world and words making it up as he goes along
for he great poet though he be never learned to speak Crow.
The great man glares at the sun
willing it into submission the sun falters on a hillside.
He disappears into the snow his fragile footprints
vanishing in a trice lost to time
as if he has never been born.
Crow does his best impression
mocks and mimics the human's thought.
"Nailing Heaven and earth together -
So man cried, but with God's voice. And God bled, but with man's blood. "
A bell breaks the sky's silence
crows scatter to the heavens.
"Oh that Charlie Crow...he is a one!"
One crow smirks to another.
"He do that Ted Hughes to a tee!"
*** T.S. Eliot’s 1922 masterpiece “The Waste Land” was originally titled “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” a quote from Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.
I went to see Ted Hughes at the Royal Festival Hall after an extensive day and night shift work in mental health for about four days as staff went sick or simply didn't turn up.. Couldn't remember if I was to meet my ******* Thursday in Friday street or not or wot. I was right under his lectern and he looked immense and a lot like Sam the Eagle in the Muppet Show in looks and manner. I kept falling asleep between syllables and would **** myself awake and every time I did so I would get that fierce Hughesian glare!