Rainbirds

Peregrine has put them up;
one, against one thousand. They
need eyes in the back of their head.
His eyes, forwards only, burning
on the brown-gold and white
pulsating flock.

They are too many – or he is satisfied.

He sails on, his sleek black anchor
denying the pull of the lough,
while the plovers, on a puff of air,
split, into earth and shimmering light.

In this poem, ‘lough’ is pronounced ‘loff’ in accordance with the local Northumberland dialect – (that
is, as rhyming with ‘cough’, not ‘flock’). Plover – from the French ‘plouvoir’ – to rain.

Moorlight

beyond nettle high walls
muffled voices
dead farmsteads
and mining hushes

beyond nameless winter pools
thundering hooves sulk
and glisten
no curlews call

before words were written
they were uttered
before utterance
stone and water

unspoken “O”
and stone
after stone

now grey moorlight presses
against volcanic surges
grinding meteors
from Orion’s belt
to a shimmering dust
as delicate as porcelain

and still water in hollows

pure
by the stars
and the moon
and the sun

and coiling up inside
my head answers
to questions that will
never now be said

Jim Lloyd is a winner in the Rialto ‘Nature and Place’ poetry competition. His poems have appeared in The Rialto, Stand, bind, Green Ink Poetry, One Hand Clapping Online, Presence Haiku Journal, and Wales Haiku Journal. He is studying for a practice-based PhD at Newcastle University, considering representations of avian perception. He lives in Northumberland, UK. In his poetry, he considers the natural world (birds in particular), how it exists for itself and how it exists in correlation with humans and human relationships. Explore his website here: https://www.jamesjosephlloyd.com/