Skylarks

I

The lark begins to go up

Like a warning

As if the globe were uneasy –

Barrel-chested for heights

Like an Indian of the high Andes,

A whippet head, barbed like a hunting arrow,

But leaden

With muscle

For the struggle

Against

Earth’s centre

And leaden

For ballast

In the rocketing storms of the breath.

Leaden

Like a bullet

To supplant

Life from its centre.

II

Crueller than owl or eagle

A towered bird, shot through the crested head

With the command,

Not die

But climb

Climb

Sing

Obedient as to death a dead thing.

III

I suppose you just gape and let your gaspings

Rip in and out through your voicebox

O lark

And sing inwards as well as outwards

Like a breaker of ocean rolling the shingle

O lark

O song, incomprehensibly both ways –

Joy! Help! Joy! Help!

O lark

IV

You stop to rest, far up, you teeter

Over the drop.

But not stopping singing

Resting only for a second

Dropping just a little

Then up and up and up

Like a mouse with drowning fur

Bobbing and bobbing at the well-wall

Lamenting, mounting a little –

But the sun will not take notice

And the earth’s centre smiles.

V

My idleness curdles

Seeing the lark labour near its cloud

Scrambling

In a nightmare difficulty

Up through the nothing

Its feathers thrash, its heart must be drumming like a motor,

As if it were too late, too late.

Dithering in ether

Its song whirls faster and faster

And the sun whirls

The lark is evaporating

Till my eye’s gossamer snaps

and my hearing floats back widely to earth.

After which the sky lies blank open

Without wings, and the earth is a folded clod.

Only the sun goes silently and endlessly on with the lark’s song.

VI

All the dreary Sunday morning

Heaven is a madhouse

With the voices and frenzies of the larks,

Squealing and gibbering and cursing

Heads flung back, as I see them,

Wings almost torn off backwards – far up

Like sacrifices set floating

The cruel earth’s offerings

The mad earth’s missionaries.

VII

Like those flailing flames

The lift from the fling of a bonfire

Claws dangling full of what they feed on

The larks carry their tongues to the last atom

Battering and battering their last sparks out at the limit –

So it’s a relief, a cool breeze

When they’ve had enough, when they’re burned out

And the sun’s sucked them empty

And the earth gives them the O.K.

And they relax, drifting with changed notes

Dip and float, not quite sure if they may

Then they are sure and they stoop

And maybe the whole agony was for this

The plummeting dead drop

With long cutting screams buckling like razors

But just before they plunge into the earth

They flare and glide off low over grass, then up

To land on a wall-top, crest up,

Weightless,

Paid-up,

Alert,

Conscience perfect.

VIII

Manacled with blood,

Cuchulain listened bowed,

Strapped to his pillar (not to die prone)

Hearing the far crow

Guiding the near lark nearer

With its blind song

“That some sorry little wight more feeble and misguided than thyself

Take thy head

Thine ear

And thy life’s career from thee.”