A Christmas poem

I've been reading and re-reading the BookArtObject set text by Rosemary Dobson as I assemble boxes over Christmas because I've pasted the poem in full in the bottom of each box. It has made me think about poems and the fact I don't often read them, and I thought you might like a poem I saw in Lesley's Printed Material blog... Lesley, I hope you don't mind me quoting you!

Feet that could be clawed but are not...
Arms that might have flown but did not...
No-one said 'Let there be angels' but the birds

Whose choirs fling alleluias over the sea,
Herring gulls, black backs carolling raucously
While cormorants dry their wings on a rocky stable.

Plovers that stoop to sanctify the land
And scoop small, roundy mangers in the sand,
Swaddle a saviour each in a speckled shell.

A chaffinchy fife unreeling in the marsh
Accompanies the tune a solo thrush
Half sings, half talks in riffs of wordless words.

As hymns flare up from tiny muscled throats,
Robins and hidden wrens whose shiny notes
Tinsel the precincts of the winter sun.

What loftier organs than these pipes of beech,
Pillars resounding with the jackdaws' speech,
And poplars swayed with light like shaken bells?

Wings that could be hands, but are not...
Cries that might be pleas but cannot
Question or disinvent the stalker's gun,

Be your own hammerbeam angels of the air
Before, in a maze of space, you disappear,
Stilled by our dazzling anthrocentric mills.

Carol of the Birds by Anne Stevenson
From 'Light Unlocked' Christmas Card Poems published by Enitharmon

I suppose it means something to me partly because the birds are Northern European ones with which I'm familiary, as is the landscape. But anyway, I liked it! It's not quite the same looking out of my windows and seeing parrots and honey eaters feasting on grevilleas in the sunshine, but that's the magic of Christmas in Australia in the summertime - something totally different.

Arachne

I think I shed my skin somewhere over Belgium
a brittle undercarriage falling from 30,000 feet.
I felt the tearing on my belly as it dropped away,
new scars over old scars.

Eye pits sense only light and dark,
fill with tears.
Pink flesh, not hardened yet, flinching from new light
warmed and blinded at the same time.

Forty years of webs, practicing. Sorrow sometimes
hung like dewdrops, cold beads, a weighty necklace on
winter mornings.

Now I take my children with me, free falling, only
a thin silk line
to cast out as we drift and hope we catch in something
soft.

Dawn is warmer here. One leg delicately stepping onto
the grass. One hand cuts open the box and takes out the loom.