Base - a poem by John Burnside

I 

All day the planes. Morning,
then afternoon.  

The roll of the tide  
the song of the earth  
drowned out  

by the screaming of engines  
that  
Nagasaki howl.  

II 

By the station at Leuchars  
the buds of a Japanese cherry  
are starting to break,  

the March light flowers and pools  
on a sandstone wall  

and out in the yellowing grass  
at the end of the platform  
a yellowhammer flits along the hedge  

its call half song, half  
fragment of conversation 

threaded between the twigs,  
insistent and pure  
like a question that no one can answer.  

It's repeated with small variations  
again and again, 

thrown to the wind 
that follows the simmer of tracks  

to the bridge in the midst of the fields
and that quiet beyond

where a dog fox wakes in the earth
to the scent of the evening 

and little owls float out beneath a moon
that feels so close we might, with one small step

abandon this wreck of a world and begin anew
in The Sea of Tranquility, Carmen, The Lake of Time.

III 

Spring and all. A shadow in the grass
is neither the shadow that forms
in a slant of light  

or the darkness that lingers an hour 
in the blue of day

but something worn: a vacancy; a gap;  
a slow tear in the fabric of the world
that blackens as it spreads, like oil, or blood, 

like oil, or blood, with every scheduled scream.

Retirado daqui.