Spring Song Poem by C Richard Miles

On a cold, grizzled-grey April afternoon, I waited ages for the village bus
Not expecting any magic music, bored stupid, standing gazing at the base
Of the leaning telegraph pole all crazy-angled across the rough road
Whilst muted mumbling jarred around me as traffic harrumphed and roared.
White, still-winter clouds hissed white noise through the airwaves as they swept
Till a rhapsody in blue clanged out, as a denim-blue rag of sky swiped
A path in the dead-white, grey-white cumulus cauliflowers, mixed like broth
By the tuneless, whistling wind, playing undreamt melodies in its breath.
Then the hiss and crackle were interrupted – a bustling avian bard
Landed on the middle rung of the wires. The piping-pipit poet of a bird
Puffed out his proud chest, announcing in a foghorn voice so loud:
I’m here. He sat there, of all he surveyed, the unchallenged lyric lord -
Just a bird, so small, a semiquaver B flat on the middle of the five wires,
That music stave hung between the two bar-line posts, showing his wares
To his mate. She flew over to him, tinier still, a diva of a demisemiquaver
On the thin G wire below, in harmony now warbling, wings all of a quiver,
Two tiny notes, in the ocean of discord from the humming sky above them,
Singing for all their worth. Now a flock of starlings passed, a new theme
Dipping and diving through the air across the wires, creating a mosaic
Against the heavens, a fluttering, feathered clash of raucous, modern music
Dotted across the wire clef. Clattering, rattling crotchets and dotted notes
Swirled in and out. From the bush beneath, percussion’s clapping castanets
Rattled out, as two blackbirds hustled and bustled in the undergrowth’s green.
The aged willow-tree conductor opposite smiled with a fresh-leaved grin
As, bent over his wooden-fence podium, he brandished a baton-like wand
Conjuring birdsong’s bravura symphony with branches waving in the wind.
A quieter intermezzo next, as distant stock doves cooed and caressed their song
To a background of tinkling, tripping, tippling triplets which the waterfalls sing
Before the bridge, a weird and wonderful water music, Handeled with care,
Accompanied with the droning bagpipes of a spluttering, starting car
Till, taking his bow at the climax, appeared, like an operatic hero brave,
The plump pigeon Pavarotti, landing with a thump, a squat semibreve
On the high D wire. Crescendo followed crescendo until, step by step
In Wagnerian semitone key-shifts, the rumbling tuba of a bus rolled up to the stop
To end nature’s impromptu composition, and waked me from my dreams
With a brash, bashing, clashing coda of its door’s resounding drums.