Poem: Chukor

 

He chuckled to the moonlit night

Barred, browned plump partidge;

He looked like a magistrate

who had taken a bribe, securely smug;

But something I saw, something in his eys,

that made him more than mundane;

A peculiar pain, an age old hurt,

the remembrance of other moonlit nights

and the freewheeling songs of the soul

amidst the stony slag,

grey heaps,

and the thorny forests of his youth

clinging to sharp fells,

the coming together in the purple heather;

Thus had he chuckled his mating cry,

many a time before,

under the moon,

to hear it joyfully answered. 

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* From A Sad Piper, 1994