Poem - Thinking of stardust by Crowfield Church

I wrote this poem last year after a delightful Suffolk holiday. Imagine watching a green woodpecker stabbing the grass in the graveyard of a medieval church.......

Thinking of stardust by Crowfield Church
That call, that shock of feathers, of moss and blood,
behind a half-timbered church.
A green woodpecker with a snake-like tongue,
raked out invertebrates between the gravestones,
then flew up, a mocking cry in its wake.
The sound caught. What if, I thought, when a bird
dies the carcass is carried off by a fox or a stoat,
then partly eaten, partly left, rots and desiccates.
And on a night when the atmosphere thins
and the wind catches the drying skin of dead things,
all those atoms are gathered up into shining skeins,
particulates of wing and gristle, shifting in the solar winds?
That would make dust somehow immortal.

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