Jack Thacker – Three Poems
Jack Thacker grew up on a farm in Herefordshire. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Universities of Bristol and Exeter, researching contemporary British and Irish poetry and agriculture. He is the co-founder of the York-based poetry magazine, Eborakon.
The Hare in the Snow
My eyes adjust to a sky
as blank as a headache, a landscape
of snow-cloud florescence.
I walk across covered ploughed fields,
down delicate blackthorn hedgerows,
when a few feet away a furrow breaks for cover –
it runs
it runs and runs
and runs
bounding over whiteness, shedding whiteness
and where it lay, a crucible of melt
retains its white-hot heartbeat.
Barn Owl
My cave drip footsteps fill the barn
before I sense the silent sound
of wing in darkness –
a carpet beat out of my dimension,
sent from the vacuum of space,
a pure white blade
of soft steel – I see a feathered baby
face. With torchlight I follow
its flight path
as it traces a scythe on the night sheet
and is posted through a hole
in the velvet.
The Falconer
One day, he asked me would I like to
handle the hawk? I declined the offer.
How could the bones of the creature weigh
only as much as air? Its talons tightened
onto his stove gloved hand.
But the talent of hawks was lured by his wrist.
He’d release his Harris to the heavens
and watch it disappear – we’d turn our heads
and try to predict the stretch of skyline
from which it would return.
2 Comments
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Beautiful poems! I’m not good at analyzing poems, but even I read these three poems and have vivid images in my head.
Three very fine and evocative poems. Thank you Jack.