The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Anna Wigley

The Bird Hospital

They found you always
when you tramped the woods and barns -
the broken birds;

like Fagin stashing loot
in the chambers of his pockets
you’d close your big coat

round a tremble of feathers
and all the way home coo
and lullabye to it.

Then in the dim nursery
of your room, you’d let it free
to drag claw or wing

a few feet; see again
its quick heaves at the weight
pulling it down.

For weeks you were mother and nurse,
your patience and cunning
coaxing from a bundle of fright

a bold nipping, the tatters
of an appetite. A column of water
from a dropper,

a sponge of bread, finally
a crumb of raw meat
swabbed its throat.

You’d stroke its bright back
with one crooked finger,
enquiring anxiously

into the tension of a splint;
wake in the night
to scrabblings from a box,

throw a shawl of whisky
over unimaginable fears.
Often they died

your brave interns,
the fight leaking from them
like a dripping faucet.

One morning the eye would be milked,
the spring of the legs cut.
You’d bury them tenderly

without tears, your red fingers
angrily clawing a plot
under the spread wing of a tree.