04. Photographing Nature

Only the larger eggs survive:
as perfect as its scream
the Little Owl’s cream sphere,
the Magpie’s, the Mallard’s and the Water-hen’s.

Last week they did the nature walk
with jam-jars hung on strings
collecting tadpoles, newts.
The leaches they were told to leave alone
by Miss Holding, who was not a miss at all,
and couldn’t believe they were, “We don’t have leaches here!”
But no-one was surprised. The closest that she’d been
to a leach, was in the centre stalls at the Ritz
for an early showing of ‘The African Queen’.

But children sense that danger in their slow direction
the narrowing of the waving heads
that plop down onto taught young skin.
The water boatmen, as their name suggests
were steady and acceptable
“ Yes, yes, we are collecting them.”

One boy had responsibility
carrying the reed-mace for a nice display
but they’d burst their heads since being dropped
and then purloined for sword-play
breaking the composure of tight-packed seeds
that floated on the wafting air
along the ’Wagon-Rail-Road’ where
the iron rails ran down beside the stream which
after rain would swell and rise, gestating pools
between the sleepers, that shuddered and groaned
to the rumbling dolly-tubs of coal
hauled by their clinking chains
from the dusty mouth of the ‘Day-Hey’ mine
where the fathers bent their backs and gait
on the long walk down to the shattering face
the narrow band of shallow seams just rich enough to work.

Safe in that other world their children stand
posing before the folding Nature-table, wearing
short grey trousers and scab knees,
printed cotton dresses; crepe-soled sandals
plaits and pony-tails.

Summer sunlight streams
over the head-high sills of tall windows
but the dour space never fills.

Faded sugar paper, pipe cleaners, sawdust
poster-painted a fading green
and the clutch of birds’ eggs
tiny wren
poked and crushed by bitten nails
the yellow hammer’s, the ‘scribblers’ eggs
with their smudged dots and blotched black lines
fragmented too by clumsy hands.