FLEUR ADCOCK

Thaw

Drip, squelch, ooze, a subdued pitter-patter,
a background hum that is scarcely there.
Mostly silence. Faint creaking. Drip, drip:
a twig bows to unleash a flop of snow.

The washing-line is hung with shapeless
rags of ice, on the verge of transforming
into aerial sheets of water.
What do they taste like? Like nothing at all.

The wood pigeon complains, complains, complains.

Smaller birds venture to the branches
around their feeders, displacing now and then
a puff of white from over-laden twigs
as they tweak out half-defrosted seeds.

The wood pigeon returns to its moan.

Fleur Adcock was a New Zealand poet, editor, and translator who resided in Britain. She published many collections of poems, and her awards include the 1961 Festival of Wellington Poetry Award, the Jessie Mackay Prize in 1968 and 1972, the Buckland Award in 1968 and 1979, the New Zealand National Book Award in 1984, an OBE in 1986, the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006, and a CNZM for services to literature in 2008. An expanded edition of Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems, first published in hardback in 2019, was published simultaneously by Te Herenga Waka University Press and Bloodaxe Books (UK) on the occasion of Fleur Adcock’s 90th birthday on 10 February 2024. Fleur died in October 2024.  

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