Blackbirds loomed large in last week's poetry choices.
Today Gene Groves offers the amusing conceit of starlings as the wide boys of the garden. Sadly, at least in my part of suburbia, these endearing garden gangsters, along with the aristocratic thrushes, seem largely to have disappeared. (From Flambard's second anthology of New Poets.)
STARLINGS WITH VIOLIN CASES
These Mafia hustlers
Call the shots,
Oust puny sparrows
From their territory.
Machiavellian organisers
They lord it over the lawn,
Swagger in fancy
Italian designer suits.
Tugging spaghetti worms
Out of the earth
They swallow them al dente
Afterwards sing arias.
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