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Tue, 1:00AM
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overcast clouds
18.0°C
W 12mph
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Steve Whitaker
Features Writer
@stevewhitaker1.bsky.social
P.ublished 15th March 2025
arts
Poem Of The Week: Bird Prints By Genny Rahtz
Bird Prints
For years we lived
on the hard surface of a city
beached on the Humber
and of necessity,
absorbed the slow mix
of fresh and salt tides
that draw the margins.
We knew the weight
of territorial bird prints
on silver mud flats.
They have become
hieroglyphs of memory
for all those years
we searched for refuge,
saturated by the light
that bleaches all sense
of distance across the estuary.
For years we lived
on the hard surface of a city
beached on the Humber
and of necessity,
absorbed the slow mix
of fresh and salt tides
that draw the margins.
We knew the weight
of territorial bird prints
on silver mud flats.
They have become
hieroglyphs of memory
for all those years
we searched for refuge,
saturated by the light
that bleaches all sense
of distance across the estuary.
Here, the ‘hard surfaces’ of the city melt into the sea and sky, creating the illusion of an insubstantial distance where margins dissolve, like those of a Turner horizon. The poet’s phrasing and syntax is similarly liminal, nosing, tentatively between the present and memory as if in homage to the ‘fresh and salt tides’, whose unseen ‘mix’ performs a ministry of silence.
The obscuring of locators by the strange opaque light – Rahtz’ closing lines embody a sense of displacement – is mitigated only by the presence of bird prints in the ‘silver mud’, whose tracks are totems of memory, unknowable ‘hieroglyphs’ in the Humber flats.
Also by Steve Whitaker...
Poem Of The Week: The Old Pantry By Peter Scupham (1933-2022)Review: There's No 'F' In Wonderful By Bill BroadyPoem Of The Week: Sleeping Through By Faith LawrencePoem Of The Week: Abra-Cadabra By Grace NicholsChildren’s Book Review: Hide And Seek: A Little Wizards Adventure By Sarah Jane Elliott