Friday poem

Most Friday lunchtimes we pick up an eight-year old from school and this is my take on what happened one Friday.

 Friday blew her out of school.

 The wind was a creature unafraid,
it played on the roof of the school,
where the weather-vane pointed West.
At noon the children freed from lessons,
tasted the animalistic air,
as they ran
or scootered or cycled,
two or more abreast, peeling away, away
from the rest,
brandishing a tooth, a feather, a claw
stolen out of the jaw of the fiend.
Up on its hind legs all talons and tail
chasing through the town,
it raced through the woods like a hungry wolf
on to the beach,
where it reached the tips of the gannets' wings
wrestled the clouds,
backcombed the rainbow edges of waves,
as a child fought with the gale in the guise of a bear,
looming ten feet tall.

 Falling in to a nest full of crows,
she dozed, watching the atomised bodies of birds
forming and re-forming above her head,
in a vortex of feather and air.

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