THE LAST NIGHT, A NIGHTINGALE by Vahni Capildeo

You begin with a design:

the artist’s strokes

a kind of preening that elicits

frictive glosses from your close-up wings.

Whoever drew you also caged you,

this freehand desert-colour time-box

partly pinkish, like your eggshells.

Through a set of lilac lines,

and dawn, and dusk,

you look sideways.

Sweet, invasive and entirely silenced thing,

I’ve company to place beside you –

not yet.

Passerine bird,

in your passage from Persian to English

you’re no longer a nightingale, though you’ll warble

and curl your toes.

While you perch,

I’m minded to bring you a tree and a night

and a song to be yours: the memorable one

flung out by your namesake from a moonstruck twig

that time our deaths were forecast on the news

so we went for a walk, and rested in you

our everything lyrical forever.