This week's Sunday Morning Poet is frequent Outsideleft contributor, Jay Lewis. Jay's poems can be found on Substack, which he describes as his 'East (Birmingham) Side Story ... recent writings about a distant place'. He will be adding more poems over the forthcoming weeks. Also find his explorations of words, visuals and music on Youtube.
THE STARLING, 1976
It lay, like a crashed kite
Near the sports field
A cloud of marauding flies
Hovered above
The murdered starling.
At home time
We dared one another
To poke sticks
at its stone-smashed skull
During lunchtime
Blank eyed Robert
Rained missiles
on moving targets
Til, at last, he scored
He coaxed girls to stare
At his artistic debut
Got turned on by their
Gasps and screams
We arrived before
The caretaker did
We swore for the first time
At the nagging insects
And I hid my sickness
laughed and continued to prod.
At eight years old
my first death scene
That day, a lesson learned
From a murderous joke
Of vulnerability,
Of the corrosion of innocence
Now I Iisten for the brawling song
Watch starlings swoop beside me
Their chirruping code
A foretelling
Of an oncoming shower of stones.
© Jay Lewis
Essential Information
Jay Lewis' poems can be found on Substack, here
