Kingfisher Poem by Giles Watson

Leaning over a stone bridge, knowing
Daubenton’s bats slept
beneath me, wrapped in leather,
pollard willows, white clouds
reflected intermittently in water,
I glimpsed him.

The flash of a wing,
and he was gone.

I turned to the road,
spirits leaping like a salmon,
and daydreamed nests of fishbone
floating on a blue sea; the courting
of blue-bewinged gods and goddesses,
auburn-bellied, lucky-feathered,
the windcalmed sea like green glass,
sun-pierced to the ocean floor –

then woke from reverie,
and saw he had returned,
whetting his slender bill on willow,
fresh from fishkilling.
A scale spiralled to the water.

A glint of eye, a pinion-flash,
and he flipped like a penny
under the bridge, half-waking the bats
from insectivorous dreams.

*

The summer slumbers
to the hum of mating mayflies,
coupling and dying by the river,
and in my heat-fed dreams
my eyes chase the halcyon
over peat-brown water
past ranks of wind-rattled reeds
and alders, coned and catkin-hung,
under a blue sky.