Tag Archives: murder

Day 16 — nightingale + a trilogy of flamingo fun facts

Just playing round with a passage from Book IV of Virgil’s The Georgics where he describes an incident surrounding the Big O following his failed attempt to restore Eurydice to life (he claims he that O lamented for seven whole months).

nightingale


a nightingale nightly cries
amongst the shadowy poplars

lamenting the loss of her chicks
stolen as i saw by some hard-

hearted ploughman (what need 
has he of three featherless chicks

callously snatched from their nest).
the mourning songstress weeps 

her song throughout the night
all night, every night, repeating 

her miserable notes relentlessly
pierces all peace with her pain

wails all night, fills air all around 
with melancholy protestations.


unlike Orpheus, she has not forgotten 
how to sing

Day 16 – TIL a lot of flamingo related fun facts. (In point of fact I have lots & lots of bird facts, that I almost put a dozen of them into one megapoem, but this flamingo triptych seems to work quite well…)

flamingo triptych

i. 
there are more fake flamingos 
on Earth than real ones

ii. 
flamingos pair for life
some stay mated
for 50 years or more

nice that flamingos
are 12.5x better at 
partnering than i am 

iii.
you probably know 
a crowd of crows is called 
   a murder

& an assembly of owls
  is a parliament 
  (or wisdom, or study)

but life gets really joyful
the day you discover a flock of flamingoes
   is a flamboyance

Day 4 -CRIME DOESN’T PAY

Not sure what’s up with my sleeping patterns at the moment, but my body seems to think key hours of slumber are 8pm-2am. It’s been my standard for the past 3 or 4 nights. Which means I write one of these, put it aside to come back to & then fall asleep before posting it. Sigh. Hopefully things will clear up soon.

Today’s effort was going to be epicreads.com’s “19 Most Anticipated YA Books to Read in April” but I realised the titles, while lovely, were similar in tone to how Day 1 & Day 2’s poems turned out. So I went to one of my desktop folders “Book Lists” (which no doubt will be referred to again later) & pulled up The Irish Times’ “Best crime fiction of 2015” list instead.

Thus we have a dark love poem …

 

Camille

are you watching me
in the world gone by
from the way of sorrows

this is everything i never told you

you were the girl
on the train
in the spider’s web
my gun street girl

even after the fire of silver
bullets   those we left behind
even the dead with our
blessing   shut eyes
& sang their snowy
song of shadows

but black-eyed weeks
walking the tight
rope defence
our assassin’s acts   our
killing   weighs down
your drowned boy

I managed to get 19+out of 24 titles in (I challenge anyone to work pleasantville, acts of the assassins, the snow kimono, black-eyed susans & tennison seamlessly into a pome.)

NOTE: Here’s the article if you’re interested in who wrote what.