Alan Baker was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and now lives in Nottingham where he runs the poetry publisher Leafe Press and is editor of its webzine 'Litter'. He is currently working on a visual/ text collaboration with the Milan-based artist Rebecca Forster. Recent collections are "Letters from the Underworld" (Red Ceilings, 2018), "Riverrun" (KFS, 2019) and "A Journal of Enlightened Panic" (Shoestring, UK 2020). He has translated the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy and Abdellatif Laâbi.
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The traveller might encounter them
on the stony path by the canal
where the birds turn from sparrow and pigeon
to finch and warbler, where photons convey
energy proportional to their radiation
and blue wavelengths dominate
as the solar elevation angle
decreases. They swarm above the water
or among the long summer grasses,
their functions so many
that they cannot be enumerated.
They dwell in the heavens and minister
in blue-shifted twilight which offers
a constant polarization pattern
in non-cloudy skies that provide
orientation cues and UV patterns.
Their compound vision guides them
to pollen and dung, to mating and food,
they hover in choirs by the canal side,
with no thought of intercession
or redemption, just colour opponency,
suggesting convergent solutions
of neural computation to common problems.
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They spend their days hunting and foraging,
short nights, dawns of singing, speaking
the language of small children, becoming a symbol
of precarious living, grief and song,
visible and invisible, some say messengers,
nursery-rhymed remembrances, escape
from cats and hawks, a lily among thorns,
voice-in-the-whirlwind style, sounding like
bells borne by the breeze, or echoes
woody and resinous, shaking leaves,
tips of trees. As earth tilts towards the Sun
they congregate in crepuscular light
with inherently diverse irradiance spectra.
Their choirs soar at morning and at evening
and underpin the development of diverse flora
and extant predator populations.
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Their absence is palpable
on summer nights
when a window left open
or a door swinging in a breeze
would once have admitted
visitors too small to see,
some large enough
to batter the lightshade
or frighten the children.
It's a shadow of itself,
a once-this-was-all-fields moment,
turning stones, raking leaf-litter.
Was that a buzz? Do they bite?
Hovering over a wild rose,
swarming on excrement,
gliding on glistening wings
over the pond at dusk,
uninvited guests
after the light has gone out,
spooky, their disappearances.
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Their sense apparatus adapted
to an all-encompassing quiet,
to them our psalms or hymns
of praise are soundless as
their own wings, strung out
on tuneless vibrations, immune
to music and heedless of appeals
or peeling bells or riffs laid down
by bluesmen for laments or elegies
or born-again gladness, and yet,
cilium function and aspects
of auditory transduction leave room
for hope that they share our world
of sounds and we their nights
of trills and chirps that take us
out of a silent room to experience
intraspecific proprioception
and a last gasp of sunset.
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