.
I’ve always loved an orthodoxy, but the older I got
the more I needed the world to be complicated needlessly
by symbolism. When I was eight I made up a song about an oil rig
which began like so: ‘Oh, the oil rig has lots of things,
things for finding oil.’ Still one of the best lines
I’ve ever written. Such promise. Turns out I wasn’t special,
but. Like many of us I fell into the habit of making grand
comparisons between utterly distinct phenomena.
Couldn’t a hawk be like a protractor?
Back then the only genre of revelation that mattered to me
was the jump scare. All I wanted was for each word in my poems
to be worth more than a feather’s weight in time.
Somewhere in the back of my head the voice of a moron spoke:
this is your one shot at immortality, Bramwell—don’t choke.
.
But then there were some memorable incidents with birds:
once my father threw a stone at a seagull on the roof
and cracked the living room window—revelatory
to witness him making such a cloaca of himself—
and some birdless—once my friend lobbed a snowball directly at
his own living room window—trying to give his flatmate a fright.
Top floor tenement. Class throw. Smashed it outright. Genius!
I can’t even begin to describe the semantic function of these events.
It’s like trying to delineate grief from hope—
one is a hawk failing to stay dry and the other is remembering
the thing’s basically waterproof as it angles its head up into the rain—
oh aye it’s raining in this poem by the way sorry to mention
that good old autumn rain falling as ever for no real reason
today falling on prehistory and kitchen window alike.
Its target doesn’t matter much. Its aim is true…
.
Birds have two wings. This is grand. But here’s Zuangzi:
‘Don’t let what is human dominate what is heavenly.’
.
.
.
Colin Bramwell is a writer from the north of Scotland. His poems and translations have appeared in PN Review, Poetry Review, The Rialto, The Scotsman, Poetry Scotland. A first pamphlet, The Highland Citizenship Test, was published by Stewed Rhubarb Press in 2021. Colin came second in the 2020 Edwin Morgan Prize.