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The Sunday Morning Poet: Jay Lewis Jay Lewis' The Starling alights on the Sunday Morning Poetry Perch

The Sunday Morning Poet: Jay Lewis

Jay Lewis' The Starling alights on the Sunday Morning Poetry Perch

by Jay Lewis, Reviews Editor
first published: September, 2023

approximate reading time: minutes

Ths Starling alights the Sunday Morning Poet perch...

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This week's Sunday Morning Poet is frequent Outsideleft contributor, Jay Lewis. Jay's poems can be found on Substack, which he describes as his 'East (Birmingham) Side Story ... recent writings about a distant place'. He will be adding more poems over the forthcoming weeks. Also find his explorations of words, visuals and music on Youtube.

 

THE STARLING, 1976

It lay, like a crashed kite
Near the sports field
A cloud of marauding flies
Hovered above

The murdered starling.

At home time
We dared one another
To poke sticks
at its stone-smashed skull

During lunchtime
Blank eyed Robert
Rained missiles
on moving targets

Til, at last, he scored

He coaxed girls to stare
At his artistic debut
Got turned on by their
Gasps and screams

We arrived before
The caretaker did
We swore for the first time
At the nagging insects

And I hid my sickness
laughed and continued to prod.
At eight years old
my first death scene

That day, a lesson learned
From a murderous joke
Of vulnerability,
Of the corrosion of innocence

Now I Iisten for the brawling song
Watch starlings swoop beside me
Their chirruping code
A foretelling

Of an oncoming shower of stones.

© Jay Lewis


Essential Information
Jay Lewis' poems can be found on Substack, here

Jay Lewis
Reviews Editor

Jay Lewis is a Birmingham based poet. He's also a music, movie and arts obsessive. Jay's encyclopedic knowledge of 80s/90s Arts films is a debt to his embedded status in the Triangle Arts Centre trenches back then.


about Jay Lewis »»

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