Kit Wright’s perceptive eye and imaginative mind see the links between bird and man-made machine in this sample from his collection Ode to Didcot Power Station (Bloodaxe Books, 2014, £9.95).

The little poem below has the same imaginative touch.

CRANES IN THE MIDDLE DISTANCE

To Homer their cries suggested

Echoing bugle calls

Of an advancing host.

In grosser banqueting halls

They meant a not-to-be-bested,

Status-proclaiming roast.

~

Their angular V formation

Prompted the alphabet.

All dancing owes a debt

To their fluttering courtship rite,

And they move in imagination

As Plato’s shape of flight.

~

If what we have in lieu

Are outstretched necks of steel

Machines of inordinate strength,

Humanly charged they feel

As into expressionless blue

They measure their tensile length.

~

In beauty that soars and dips,

Delicate, riding, slow,

Upon the aerial flow

They pay their lines from the sky

And they seem high-masted ships

Round which the seagulls fly.

~

A LIKENESS

The long campaign is over

That ended in defeat.

The shields that flashed are darkened.

The lines are in retreat.

~

Each solider in that army

Hangs down his ruined head:

A burnt-out field of sunflowers,

The dying with the dead.