A Poem by David Lockyer

We sit and soak up the evening: garden, sky, presences
We're hardly here at all
Yet take in everything.

Ingredients of evening, swifts, swallows and
martins mingle but do not mix
Sky trawlers scooping the final flies of day

Seemingly no hurry to their urgent gathering.
Birdsong subdues, rallies, dwindles
As if turned down by the sun's diminishing
As if light is their volume control.

Other birds hurry or float home to roost:
A heron, a jackdaw, a finch Closing the evening as they go.

Frogs slink or spring from the pond
Progressing from stillness to stillness
Dualities of sought and seeking.

The day pours its dregs into the west
The light changes, substituting shadows for clarity
Re-assembles itself into darkness.

We await the appearance of bats.
A sudden alarm call unnerves a single pigeon,
Noisy as exposure, to percussion into flight.

A blindfolded peregrine, were this talon territory,
Could have spot-lit the clamour
And killed without bothering to bother

But only the evening is unsighted
Night now a smoky smut in its eye
Assertively expanding.

We go in.

The bats will come.
We will not see them tonight.

David Lockyer