That 6am blackbird, the one whose song is made of notes that open in the dark, the early bird that catches a worm as it slithers out of sleep, makes his pitch for sunshine and clear blue skies. This bird claims the idea of spring from those who have not left to return north yet, and from those not yet arrived from the south. He claims it in a way that snowdrops and catkins can’t because there’s nothing to contradict them.
This blackbird makes the day. There is sunshine and clear blue skies and a broadcast of snow renewing the ground. In the snow there are scrattings where a hare found a crab apple and left tracks of 2-metre leaps away from approaching breath; slots in the blackthorn thicket so narrow as if the deer that made them had no body; rabbit dabs that danced away into nothing. And there was something weird going on in the sky.
High above Windmill Hill, a vapour trail strung across the blue like rope and then began to unsplice. The trail peeled into equal halves until each split again and the silver dots of four planes were visible at the ends of four trails. What was this, military manoeuvres, sky seeding? The planes spliced together again into a single rope of vapour trailing away into the north-east, and the air hung still as if nothing odd had happened, at least nothing odder than anything else.
These long divisions continued all day: sun, rain, snow and back again; a pair of crows flew from the hill into separate limes and then returned; a gaggle of Canada geese skidded furrows across the quarry pool which then smoothed behind them; dogs growled at the white arse end of a swan headstanding to graze underwater; winter split into spring and back again.
That 6pm thrush, the darkling one, as day divided by night, his verses as silver as where the Severn flooded the Leighton meanders. It was an old song tucked away in the syrinx by his heart, let loose from his concealment to hunt the dying seconds of the light.
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