share


Thank You For Your Email

Two years ago I was walking up a mountain path

having been told of excellent views from the summit.

The day was clear and hot, the sky wide and cloudless.

There was only the sound of my breath, my boots treading,

and the faint clonking of cowbells back down the track.

What little wind there was on the climb soon dropped

as I reached the summit, as if it had been distracted

or called upon to cover events elsewhere. I drank eagerly,

catching my breath, and then took in the view, which was

as spectacular as I had been told. I could make out a tree,

a shrub, really  (it being so distant in the valley below

I couldn’t say how high), silently on fire, the smoke

trailing a vertical black line before dissipating. I watched

the flames consume the whole shrub. No one came to stop it.

No one seemed to be around to see it, and I felt very alone.

From nowhere a great tearing came: a fighter-jet, low

and aggressive, ripped above me and, surprised, I dropped

on one knee and watched it zoom, bellowing overhead.

As it passed I saw a shred of something fall, a rag, spinning.

I shielded my eyes to see, bewildered and pinned watching

the object, the rag, gather its falling weight, its speed, until

it flumped down without a bounce, only ten footsteps

to my right. It was part of a white bird, a gull. No head,

just a wing and a hunk of body. No leg, or tail, just

the wing and the torso: purple and bloodied. A violent

puddle surrounded it, already mixing with the grit.

Ferrous blood wafted and I recoiled feeling suddenly

cold and very high up and the view swam madly: I saw

for a second the flaming tree as I staggered backwards

and became aware that I was sitting, I had fallen, but I felt

as if I was falling and falling still, my mind unable to

connect the events which were real and terrifying because

they were real, only now I think it was not, perhaps,

a mountain, it was not, perhaps, a shrub on fire, and not

a fighter-jet boring its noise through the sky, and I am

certain now, it was not me, or a wing or body of a broken

bird, but the fearful and forgotten things I’ve lied to myself

about, and to my friends, and to my family.


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

is co-editor of the Stop Sharpening Your Knives anthology series (Egg Box Publishing). He received the Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and was named a Faber New Poet in 2009. He is a lecturer at Goldsmiths College and reviews new poetry for Poetry London and Poetry Review.

READ NEXT

fiction

January 2017

Peace

Patrick Cottrell

fiction

January 2017

Every morning as I walk to school through the dark blue decrepit world, I feel like I’m coming down...

Prize Entry

April 2016

DATE NIGHT

Chris Newlove Horton

Prize Entry

April 2016

He said, ‘Tell me about yourself.’ He said, ‘Tell me about you.’ He said, ‘Tell me everything. I’m interested.’...

fiction

January 2016

Good People

Nir Baram

TR. Jeffrey Green

fiction

January 2016

Good People opens in Berlin in 1938. Thomas Heiselberg has grand plans to make the company he works for the...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required