KINGFISHER

Hunched, intent, you watch small fish swim, elusive. The whole world compacts to your funneling gaze.

How swift your dive is – slammed – shuttlecock sure. One dip and you emerge, bandying your dagger about on the fence, then that sword-swallower tilt of your feeding head.

In flight, your blue wings burn against bleached sky. Incendiary indigoes!

You settle on a telephone wire, a strung sapphire shining, but duty calls you back to the pinpricked dough of a bank scored with burrows.

You push through rank passages to your plague of pink nestlings, your fumbling, blind children.