Poetry 4 April 2018 Thrush A new poem by Grey Gowrie. CREDIT: ALEXANDER FRANCIS LYDON (1836-1917) / PRIVATE COLLECTION / © LOOK AND LEARN / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES Sign UpGet the New Statesman\'s Morning Call email. Sign-up Giant eye, a livid yellow and black-rimmed eye, furious and feral, met my own at eye height inches away. It happened like this. A male thrush, a big one with obese breast and thick feathering got caught in the holly hedge which we had planted oh thirty years gone. Seventeenth century Welsh farmhouse plonked down on a hospitable plateau that interrupted the steep south-falling hillock, no doubt through interglacial realignment ten or twelve thousand years old but an eyeblink in the planet story. It welcomed nonetheless space for a dwelling, attendant barns and stables, built on now, gentrified, yeomanified really, in the 1830s. The hill fell steep again where a front lawn should be then swept gently away to the river Cain (cf. cattle not fratricide). So you get to the house by a sunken drover’s lane with a stone retaining-wall, a holly hedge all over it. So – getting on now, lame, grumpy – I found myself eyeball to eyeball with a thrush and man to man, him being formidably male and not at all frightened but furious to rage at me and my holly, poor excuses for life. It was hard to get over that reptilian eye, so livid and yellow, or that bad black look and something of the crocodile coiled within it, the beak spiky like holly, the angry pounding of a mottled breast, the eye on a par with mine. I leaned on the wall, poked with my standard-issue NHS lightweight crutch deep into the holly for a parting of ways, just to liberate him from so much anger and hostility, myself from both of these and let me hobble home for tea. It worked. After so long, so entirely songless a scrabbling, my thrush plummets improbably free to lumber into the sky like some miniature jumbo jet taking off and elegant only with height accomplished. And so horrible for him. He almost didn’t make it, had almost fallen out of his painful prison, just in time to step back into the sky milliseconds from rough ground, from earth or all we covet down here of freedom. After a few clumsy feet his elevation pumped all the oxygen out of his mottled chest and he flew so fast and so in an instant high that he looked tiny now and full of the rapture of a fighter plane or Old Master depiction of some soul leaving its body; leaving desire, anger, frustration, appetite; and leaving me to waver and shuffle, try to get back to life, get on with life or whatever was left of life; unable almost to breathe or turn home to slake the ancient malevolence in that yellow eye. Grey Gowrie’s Third Day: New and Selected Poems and The Italian Visitor are published by Carcanet. › How Labour can fight back against the British establishment’s attempt to destroy it This article appears in the 22 March 2018 issue of the New Statesman, Easter special