Читать книгу Cardos y lluvia - Kate Clanchy - Страница 39

I

Sundown on the high stonefields!

The darkening roofscape stirs –

thick – alive with starlings

gathered singing in the square –

like a shower of arrows they cross

the flash of a western window,

they bead the wires with jet,

they nestle preening by the lamps

and shine, sidling by the lamps

and sing, shining, they stir

the homeward hurrying crowds.

A man looks up and points

smiling to his son beside him

wide-eyed at the clamour on those cliffs –

it sinks, shrills out in waves,

levels to a happy murmur,

scatters in swooping arcs,

a stab of confused sweetness

that pierces the boy like a story,

a story more than a song.

He will never forget that evening,

the silhouette of the roofs,

the starlings by the lamps.

II

The City Chambers are hopping mad.

Councillors with rubber plugs in their ears!

Secretaries closing windows!

Window-cleaners want protection and danger money.

The Lord Provost can’t hear herself think, man.

What’s that?

Lord Provost, can’t hear herself think.

At the General Post Office

the clerks write Three Pounds Starling in the saving-books.

Each telephone-booth is like an aviary.

I tried to send a parcel to County Kerry but –

The cables to Cairo got fankled, sir.

What’s that?

I said the cables to Cairo got fankled.

And as for the City Information Bureau –

I’m sorry I can’t quite chirrup did you twit –

No I wanted to twee but perhaps you can’t cheep –

Would you try once again, that’s better, I – sweet –

When’s the last boat to Milngavie? Tweet?

What’s that?

I said when’s the last boat to Milngavie?

III

There is nothing for it now but scaffolding:

clamp it together, send for the bird-men,

Scarecrow Strip for the window-ledge landings,

Cameron’s Repellent on the overhead wires.

Armour our pediments against eavesdroppers.

This is a human oupost. Save our statues.

Send back the jungle. And think of the joke:

as it says in the papers, It is very comical

to watch them alight on the plastic rollers

and take a tumble. So it doesn’t kill them?

All right, so who’s complaining? This isn’t Peking

where they shoot the sparrows for hygiene and cash.

So we’re all humanitarians, locked in our cliff-dwellings

encased in our repellent, guano-free and guilt-free.

The Lord Provost sings in her marble hacienda.

The Postmaster-General licks an audible stamp.

Sir Walter is vexed that his column’s deserted.

I wonder if we really deserve starlings?

There is something to be said for these joyous messengers

that we repel in our indignant orderliness.

They lift up the eyes, they lighten the heart,

and some day we’ll decipher that sweet frenzied whistling

as they wheel and settle along our hard roofs

and take those grey buttresses for home.

One thing we know they say, after their fashion.

They like the warm cliffs of man.