World Word
by Eamon Grennan

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What over the gable end and high up under tangled cloud
that the raven might be saying to its tumble-soaring mate
or what the blackbird might intend when chattering among
scattered breadcrumbs or what the bellowing of one cow
and then another in the near field might mean remains beyond
my ken — being all noise for which no words will manage
though all is language settling and unsettling the world
beyond me . . . and yet there’s the dunnock in all
its dun colours at work among the small stones and patchy grass
of the driveway and here’s the robin’s aggressive tilt
at breadcrumbs and there goes the sudden shriek
of the blackbird. . . all alive inside the inhuman
breath-pattern of the wind trawling every last leaf
and blade of grass and flinging rain like velvet pebbles
onto the skylight: nothing but parables in every bristling inch
of the out-of-sight unspoken never-to-be-known pure
sense-startling untranslatable there of the world as we find it.

"World Word" by Eamon Grennan from THERE NOW by Eamon Grennan, copyright © 2015 The Gallery Press. Used by permission of The Gallery Press and Graywolf Press.