Wilderspool Causeway

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.