1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344454647484950515253545556

Where Are You?

In this garden, after a day of rain, a blackbird is making soundings, flinging his counter-tenor line into blue air, to where an answering cadenza shows the shape and depth of his own solitude.

Born in South London, inheritors of brick, smoke, slate, tarmac, uneasy with pastoral as hillbillies with high-rise, my parents called each other in blackbird language: my father's-interrogative whistle — 'where are you?'

my mother's note, swooping, dutiful — 'here I am'.

There must have slid into the silences the other qubstions, blind, voiceless worms whose weight cluttered his tongue; questions I hear as, half a lifetime on, I eavesdrop on blackbirds.

Carole Satyamurti

Previous page

Next page