Published May 15th, 2025
by Rosemary Hector
These fragments I have shored against my ruins. – The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot
No more fragments of word. It's all visual now –
stock images, global and easily drawn, CYMK printed.
Not cartoons as preparatory sketches for Great Art –
no, it's cartoons as instant comms, clip art.
And ruin's guaranteed – shoring against it not possible.
Like the ostrich. An image? It's not even accurate.
An illusion – they don't bury their heads in the sand.
They are in fact leaning over their eggs, turning them,
keeping them warm in their nest half underground.
We think birds with small heads aren't very bright.
This is not so. As they stretch and peer up and out
they aren't pretending – they're horizon scanning –
miles away – assessing risk, danger. Run! Run! Run!
Their bodies are like a basket of feathers, held up
on pink spindly drumsticks, jiggling, ruffling
when they sprint, wings all a-bounce, warning the others.
Beware – feathers at forty k per hour are dangerous,
and ostriches kick. They're more fearsome than you think.
There's something terrible and yet dispensable
about the ostrich. They're caricature – unknown.
Fragments – long legs, long necks, dark bodies
as mediated by documentaries and U tube
and the occasional safari-as-education,
will not shore us up against anything.
An antidote to the terror of having only memory of the ostrich
is noticing what's here, immediate. In my case, it's the dipper.
A pair live by the river near my house. Rounded, short tailed.
Dippers are dark, have white bibs that blink, twinkle
as they slip and dip from stones to sip the water.
I followed the river upstream once
had to dismiss crisp packets, pieces of paper
before I found them – a pair shyly winking
catching insects under a bridge.
They are a fragment of nature left
but dippers will shore us up against
nothing but a blue day when memory fails
for dippers nest beside their food –
larvae that inhabit water, and their horizons
are extremely limited. They don't migrate –
occasionally go upstream to find a mate.
(The ultimate ambition.) Yet they tell us
about our future and when a dipper blinks
and disappears, we know to worry.
The ostrich may go the way of the dodo
in our mean world of only magpies
and pigeons who have it out with each other on the lawn –
and cosseted ospreys, the occasional over-recorded kite.
But the dipper is our metaphor for survival,
its design purposeful. Yet it cannot hold a long view.
Our ruin cannot be shored up by the dipper
as we mourn the image we had of the ostrich.
About the Poet
Rosemary Hector resides in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Read the poet's biography on Rosemary Hector's Artist Page.
This poem is included in Poetry World #12,
published in the Wax Poetry and Art Library.
Previously published in Edinburgh Poetry Magazine:
Night Ward
by Anna Forbes
Edinburgh Poetry Magazine is part of the Wax Poetry and Art Network.
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- Visit the Wax Poetry and Art Library.
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