I left the car on the cliff top,
went looking for a toilet, found a bird.
There used to be a coal mine under here –
that’s what the guidebook said,
and the mark on the map.
It’s long dead, whatever it was,
probably dead when I was at home
looking it up in the bird book.
Fieldfare? Thrush? Which colour plate,
which description did it fit?
Anyway, there it was, trapped in a toilet block
in a car park empty of other visitors.
There were only two of us.
This assemblage of stone sand wind and air
progressed up and down the cubicles,
one two three four five five four three two one
its feet scrabbling on the overhead cisterns.
Too far above me to catch, it wouldn’t be wafted
towards the doorway with my map.
Already I was trying to name it as it struck
at the skylight that we could both see.
Death was always certain – inside a neglected egg,
by teeth or talon, by being shaken loose.
It didn’t need its name, only the sky which turned solid on it.
I flushed and walked out over the stone floor
into the wind, past the laminated pictures of the mine.
I got back into the car, drove to the heritage museum
where miners are trapped on a screen, to be bidden by a button
so someone knows they’re still there.
It’s history now, that bird. I thought about it
on the motorway all the way home.
Isabel is from and of London where she works in a museum. In a former life she was a youth worker then a tour guide. Her poems has been published in Orbis and she can be found discussing poetry, art, gardening urban history, and the natural world on her Instagram account @ijgreenslade.
Foxglove Journal 