NORTHFIELD NIGHTINGALE

Thick with emotion
A dark patch on its lung
The voice hung
Pulsating.

You catch your breath to say

Regret the time the air came
Cruelly clean
Before sensation’s rape,
Regret the chequered throat,
Cadential sadnesses,
That monotone note

Regret

(As if gales of spring
Ruffling an olive nape
And the evasive heart
Gentled this thing
To its hazel thicket).

Stored inconsequences:

Into the dusk
The clear mind of a boy
And the fallen world
Of a bird’s spasmodic song.

Members who enjoy poetry may like to look beyond the poem’s evocation of the nightingale’s song. There is reference to the Philomela myth and to the terminal illness of John Keats, the Ode to a Nightingale poet. ~ Editor