Days of Spring

Days of Spring
This pheasant
lives in a cage of words,
black sticks bent just so, floating
in imagination’s thicket.

When he calls - chack chack,
a woodland copse, tree trunks
packed close, appear in my room,
the darkly silvered stems like shadows.

As I watch new buds and blossom
unfurl, on boughs reaching to the sun,
above the dark chaos beneath,
I smell petrichor, I smell musk.

I know that the night will be cold,
that frost will grab the delicate buds
and wither shoots and petals,
I feel the cold blanket of the earth.

Chack, Chack, Chaccck, he screams
as the gun rebounds and the bullet
hits his chest, bright plumage broken,
male pride exploded into dust.

I shiver as I pour my feelings
onto the silence of white space
I write to preserve his bright plumage,
immortalise him in my memory.

His resting place a copse in spring
in a land where pheasants strut