The Observer's Book of Birds

These bright jays are rare jewels set in jet
among the dead.

The crows are a just darker marquetry,
inlaid on dead and dying
blacked up like minstrels by sun and flies.

Larger and blacker still the ravens
have a talent for mimicry
and will repeat the dying pleas and mate for life.

Their calls like shaken matchboxes
the magpies are one for bad and two for good luck –
we call them captain and try to count,

but the calculation of our fortunes is beyond us.

These bodies have lain themselves down
and lifted up these hungry lives
until we could believe, endless,
the men have shed like snakes
and set their hungry mouths upon the waste.

After a highly commended entry in the Christopher Tower poetry competition in 2003, Tim Smith-Laing contributed to the Parachute Silk collection published as a result of the Tower Summer School that year. He has been published in Agenda Broadsheet, and was one of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year in 2004. He is currently studying English at Pembroke College, Cambridge University.