Sport 40: 2012
Feathers, bones, beaks and feet
21 April: Museum of Natural History, Oxford
Feathers, bones, beaks and feet
In the drawer’s forest-scented
darkness I lie on my back.
An impossible posture—
claws grip dead air
where no branch could be,
head thrown back beyond
the reach of song.
According to inheritance
I should have been
an evergreen bird;
instead I flare this rare
and fatally desirable
sun-yellow. Even so,
even here, there is reason
to be thankful. For example
the display case titled
Feathers, Bones, Beaks and Feet.
Someone out there is resurrecting
viruses from the Pleistocene.
One day surely useless beauty too
will stage its comeback:
bigger, better, cosseted,
and harbouring one vengeful
and unseen disease preserved
page 354
and nurtured for millennia
by my unforgetting half-
sisters, the harpies.