Sparrow by Norman MacCaig
Channel: Leamington Books
Date: 2016-09-29

Reading of the poem 'Sparrow' by Norman MacCaig by Leamington Books.

Sparrow by Norman MacCaig

He’s no artist

His taste in clothes is more

dowdy than gaudy.

And his nest – that blackbird, writing

pretty scrolls on the air with the gold nib of his beak,

would call it a slum.

To stalk solitary on lawns,

to sing solitary in midnight trees,

to glide solitary over grey Atlantics –

not for him: he’d rather

a punch up in a gutter.

He carries what learning he has

lightly – it is, in fact, based only

on the usefulness whose result

is survival. A proletarian bird.

No scholar.

But when winter soft-shoes in

and these other birds –

ballet dancers, musicians, architects –

die in the snow

and freeze to branches

watch him happily flying

on the O-levels and A-levels

of the air.