This poem was written back in 2021, when I was writing both prose and poems about some of the children I worked with at the child psychiatric unit,
Two Birds and a Boy
The curlew with the beautiful soft drawn feathers summoned me back.
Afternoon in the classroom, the boy is delivered back in by the nurses, quieter now, withdrawn.
He takes the paper and brush and, working silently, straight from the paint, a pheasant appears –
the soul of this ten-year-old boy.
One day he had tried, unsuccessfully, to hang himself in that other, quiet, village classroom.
The next day he had taken his father’s shotgun to the school, to threaten the teacher and end the torment.
He hadn’t fired the gun, but thrown it and fled to the woods where the police, eventually, found him.
He’d been caged, boxed in and tormented. A boy from up on the forest, who could fix a broken wing or nurse an orphan lamb but neither read nor write.
Where is he now? Does he still paint?
He’ll be nearly forty, if he, like me, survived.