Month: April 2021

From Slough Sewage Works
to a football field in Uxbridge;
Can you spot the Ring-billed Gull
among the others? Portland Bill,
in raptures: first a Desert Wheatear,
then a Ring Ouzel. And where
was the heath, that hot March
with the Crossbills? Whatever
is on the line, we follow the majesty
to places thought unvisitable.
Something’s blown in on tumbledown winds
so pack the flapjacks

and start the Passat. We’re off
to Vauxhall Sand Martins,
gravel pits and estuary flats,
seabirds slotted between tower blocks –
cormorants off the Isle of Dogs.
Can you sense the sea by St Edmund’s,
Millwall, reflected back
in shallows of the outer dock?
We’ll mark the species off,
more than a hundred in twelve hours,
from Slough Sewage Works
to a football field in Uxbridge,
from the post-dawn grey of Portland Bill
to an equivalent dusk on Bugsby’s marshes.