Simon Robert Armitage (1963), English poet, playwright, musician and novelist. Poet Laureate, 2019.
ARTIFICIAL NEST
When the old fool got drunk
saw the owl,
He swore blindly that he was an angel.
'Half-man, half-eagle,'
he said to someone in the town square.
'White flames in the air,
a ghost with wings, he cooed
the gathered crowd.
'A strange presence'
appearing from the heavens,'
told the gathered reporters
before he fainted.
They roamed the meadows and heaths
but they only found piles of small bones and teeth
and partially decomposed skulls and fur
and hair tied in knots.
Which was strange, because when the young girl
and saw the angel and swore blindly that it was an owl,
but when the birdwatchers went to the grove
and looked into the artificial nest
they found silver feathers
and bright poop
and a warm meteorite
and a few feathers made entirely of light.
Nest Box
When the drunken old fool/ saw the barn owl,//he swore blind it was an angel./'Half-human, half-eagle,'//he told someone in the town square./'White flames in mid-air,//a ghost with wings,' he crowed/ to the gathering crowd.//'A weird presence/ that materialized out of the heavens,'// he said to the scrum of reporters/ before he keeled over.// They searched the meadow and heath/ but found only pellets of small bones and teeth //and skulls and part-digested fur /and knotted hair.// Which was strange, because when the young girl/ saw the angel she swore blind it was a barn owl,// but when birdwatchers went to the copse/ and looked in the nest box// they found tinselly silver threads/ and luminous turds// and a warm meteorite/ and a few feathers made only of light.
Note:
By Carol Rumens
Poetry Nest Box is part of the 'Dwell' collection, a small collection illustrated by Cornish artist, Beth Munro.
The poem with a short title, as well as Drey, Den, Hibernaculum and Insect Hotel, focuses on the safe places, natural or made-up, inhabited by the wildlife of the restored Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall. Indeed, we are told, the poems “will be physically displayed at site-specific locations and in a variety of forms” – as installations, plaques, sculptures and so on. To this end, Dwell, is an illustrated preprint, an informal, engaging and often humorous short collection that will appeal to younger and casual readers, and sharpen the ecological awareness of any reader.
The Lost Gardens project today and in its planned future restorations has a profound ecological significance, as Dwell makes clear. It is a narrative with major historical-political dimensions, too, about class, regionalism and the First World War. I am already speculating and hoping that there will be a full collection later of the poet laureate’s heartfelt engagement with “Willow Garden” (as its Cornish name translates). It is rich material.
While the poems in Dwell are both earthy and free-spirited, Vest Box addresses more fundamental issues about what we define as real. On first reading, it brings to mind similar issues raised by one of my favorite children's books, Skelling, by David Almond. There, the eponymous protagonist could be almost any homeless person, but as he himself admits to the children who rescued him, he is indeed “something that combines aspects of the human, the fool, and the angel.” Almond acknowledges the influence of a short story by Gabriel García Márquez, ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,’ usually classified as magical realism. Armitage’s poetry is more indirect: it does not fit easily into any genre box, it is essentially about problematizing the human response to natural phenomenon and asking how we provide “evidence” to challenge our possible illusions. There is an ecological force to the inquiry: people need a kind of fascination to make them care about the environment in a less egocentric way, but we need to know what we see when we see “nature” in order to be able to protect it. It is a very important issue for poets as well.
The artificial nest begins when the “drunken old fool” (or someone supposedly like him) swears “blindly” that he has seen an angel in the sky. He mutters a chorus of contradictory images: “half-man, half-eagle,” “White flames in the air, a ghost with wings.” Reporters investigating the story, after the man “fains,” search for evidence, but find only the remains of the owl’s last meal.
Armitage’s narrative, casual but resolutely objective, is sewn up with the rhetorical qualifications of “strange” and “but then”… A second observer, a young girl, swears that what she saw was an owl. But are the two visions consistent? The evidence of the angel’s sighting consists of the remains of small mammals (“pellets of small bones and teeth, // and skulls, and part-digested fur / and knotted hair”). The owl’s testimony is followed by birdwatchers, a breed of narrator we would expect to be more unreliable than that of reporters. They inspect the artificial nest and find a mysterious jumble: “tinselly silver threads / and luminous turds // and a warm meteorite / and a few feathers made only of light.” Are the angel and the owl sharing the artificial nest by chance?
There are energetic if not unexpected “turns” like Armitage’s rapid movements, rhymed or half-rhymed couplets roll by, carrying lyrical and journalistic tones. No judgment is imposed: in the evening, the evidence of the artificial nest of the angel may be as incredible as that of what the old man saw, of the creature itself. The imaginative intelligence of young and not-so-young readers is fed with worry. What evidence, we wonder, will show that an angel used the artificial nest intended for an owl? What is an angel? What is this here? Certainly not an old man with wings and not big and strange like the one seen by the “drunken old fool”. It is an angel the size of an owl, or smaller. Should we turn our minds to Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica? It may not be any traditional angel, but, when it comes to the “warm meteorite,” it is not essentially supernatural. The muscles of reasoning and imagination must be constantly exercised by us earthlings, not least because it is certain that life forms on other planets will one day be discovered.
Armitage’s “Welcome Note” for Dwell is significant for the poem ‘The Artificial Nest’. In it, he describes how his parents struggled to protect the shelters of their proudly maintained social housing estate from the invading hawks that built their nurseries there. “This kind of inhospitality,” Armitage writes, “has increased in direct proportion to the growth of the human population, and the consequence of the lack of a home for most living things is extinction. hawks are now red-listed birds.” It’s something to keep in mind as we savor the magic and humor of the owl angel, but also to wonder about the last traces of his habitation in the artificial nest designed for him.
/The Guardian
/Express newspaper
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