World Word

What over the gable-end and high up under tangled cloud that raven might be saying to its tumble-soaring mate or what the blackbird might intend when chattering among scattered breadcrumbs or what the bellowing of one cow then another in the near field might mean remains beyond my ken—being all noise for which no words will manage though all is language settling and unsettling the world beyond me . . . and yet there’s the dunnock in all its dun colours at work among the small stones and patchy grass of the driveway and here’s the robin’s aggressive tilt at breadcrumbs and there goes the sudden shriek of the blackbird . . . all alive inside the inhuman breath-pattern of the wind trawling every last leaf and blade of grass and flinging rain like velvet pebbles onto the skylight: nothing but parables in every bristling inch of the out-of-sight unspoken never-to-be-known pure sense-startling untranslatable there of the world as we find it.