Caroline Hawkridge is a webcam watcher whose grandfather came from Derby. She has written a prize-winning poem inspired by our peregrines and donated her winnings to this project. ‘Peregrine’ was Highly Commended in the national York Open Poetry competition and published in the Scottish-US poetry magazine The Dark Horse, http://www.thedarkhorsemagazine.com/.
Caroline says, “for me, Derby’s peregrines have a strange beauty and are beautifully strange, especially through different cameras and against the cityscape. Like urban peregrines, my poem is unconventional, sweeping across verses to echo their flight. The changing line length is also intended to act like a lens, focusing in and out.
The poem begins with a song from the blog one Christmas and then weaves together snippets from 2009 including Cathy’s fall (see archive). However, I wanted readers elsewhere to feel that peregrines could arrive in their city too so, for example, I changed Jury’s Inn into a skyscraper. Also, ‘wet flies and flymphs’ are artificial fish bait created by dressing a hook with tiny pieces of feather to mimic an insect.
Lastly, I’d like to thank Nick B, Nick M, the cathedral and all concerned for their tremendous ongoing commitment to these birds and their global audience.”
Peregrine
1. Foreign, imported from abroad, outlandish.
2. Kind of falcon much used for hawking.
Concise Oxford
The blog sings
Four golden plover, three...
then says the cathedral was table
for woodcock
while the country sat down
to turkey.
The bell-tower’s peregrines open
the ribs of migrants
all winter. And a blackbird
on the North side.
Spring spreads its breast feathers, lets the bald
skin of the sun
brood. The cathedral clock nudges the city
with its long bill. Lenses wait, want
to annunciate.
She will
fidget
four rufous eggs
by the lion-tailed rump of a gargoyle
and several webcam
eyeballs. The nostril in her beak wears the bony
inlet cone of a jet engine.
Even sleep is ascent as her lower lid rises
to close.
A starling’s coverts chequer her ledge. Its hackles, prized
by fly-dressers for wet flies and flymphs,
were cast. The tiercel keeps surfacing from the bottom
of the city.
He blots
a serif of the new
letter ‘R’, the lustre of his feet illuminating the blue
like the idle yellow crane. Only the ‘Y’ to finish
glass-office minting sky. Here,
again in his gloves: on
a stone finial, police aerial, council roof safety rails, stashing
a corpse in a quatrefoil.
Viewers hatch
their global locations
on the blog, a line of tourists sprockets past the telescope
on the green
below, as he reads
them this city,
leaves
the bloodied bill of a snipe, the yellow-green
leg of a moorhen taken
to the radio station. She will
feed
the lead gape
of the nave roof its confetti
of feet and beaks.
A world is
asking,
admiring, angry, arguing; the growing clamour
like the oldest ring
of ten bells in England not
deafening the wing-spreading
chicks
crowding
the tower’s high pavement, opening
and closing their fledging
umbrellas like spoke-dodging
commuters, until the odd gets
caught, spirals off
the cathedral.
The blog uploads
wing bones fossilised in light;
the wind’s angel born
bent. All day,
she will
call.
call.
