Moontree Arts

The Magpie

One day the magpie stole my words.
One for sorrow, she said,
unfolding her iridescent wings.

Up she flew, the words
struggling and panting in her beak,
to the creaking topmost of the wood.

There, where fretful branches scratch
their crooked runes against the sky,
she laid them in a mess of twigs and mud.

She left me standing here,
tongue-frozen, still as roadkill,
in this frantic place.

I could not talk to you,
could not speak this shy world into being.
I could not even say my name.

Meanwhile, in that untidy nest,
my words lie jumbled
with other useless, shiny baubles.

She preens her glossy coat, opens
a dark, sarcastic eye, looks down.
Two for joy, she says.

*****

After the magpie stole my words,
(Three for a girl, four for a boy, she said)
I understood that everything had changed.

In the wood, the trees refused
to speak to me. They looked away
whispering amongst themselves.

In the house, piano music
unpicked itself to random notes
creeping beneath two closed doors.

At the beach, the hiss of tide on shingle
forgot its rhythm, made no sense.

In the sky, the moon, uncertain,
lost its way, wandered aimlessly.

Deprived of words, I am reduced.
I have become negative space.
I can connect nothing.

So, here I am once more, mining
deep beneath a tangled web of roots,
hacking words out of a two-foot seam.

Old magpie will be watching still,
for she and her kin have always known
that five is for silver and six for gold.

She opens a dark, vindictive eye.
Seven is for a secret never to be told, she says.

*****

I shall consider these baubles,
pilfered from the greed of men,
as I perch here in my domain of air
preening my perfect feathers.

Eight is for a wish, I say.

And why would they wish for such trinkets?
Pointless, shiny things; vacuous words.
Yet, they scrabble for them viciously,
each locked down in that mundane dirt.

I see them.
Landlocked.
They cannot even fly.

I sift them with my covetous beak,
my kidnapped treasures,
open my dark, anarchic eye, count them.

Nine for the devil, his old self, I say.