Today, a poem from the second Proost poetry collection, which emerged five years after the first, this time with a bunch of editors to make the process more manageable.
This one is by Paul Bradbury, who weaves a spell of words inspired by hearing that most elusive of songsmiths, the nightingale.
Going to Hear the Nightingale, by Paul Bradbury
You have to know the place
Like a pilgrimage site. These thin spaces
Where nature’s threatened saints
Still sing their foolish song
Do not reveal their secrets lightly
Tonight the gloaming holds us
Tightening us, diminishing us down
To milky silence and the clear miracle
Of the nightingale, spinning its faultless
Falling cadences of grace
No-one wants to leave
Each of us stays until the song
Has left it’s trace, until the faint
Edge of Wilderness has lightened us
And cleaved us from ourselves
Until the darkness drinks us back to the cars
Which hungrily wait for us, ticking by the hedge
And on the drive back there is just the echo
Of that song, repeating, repeating
And the urgent flashing of the fuel light
Telling us we are running low, running low
