Ninth Day -Ghost Bat

Eighth Day – Brandt’s Bat

http://zmmu.msu.ru/bats/rusbats/gallery/pmbra.html#a

Seventh Day – Honduran White Bat

Ectophylla alba (honduran white bat) in Tortuguero National Park, Costa Rica

-Neal Zetter

-Andrew Nightingale

Honduran White Bat

Briefly stay in many leaf homes we make.
First our teeth cut holes on leaf underside,
our feet and thumbs grab hold, our thumbs pull, take
it downwards, break some leaf fibers, decide

to abandon it. Continue others.
I and three more stay with Him in one, two
Long Darknesses, then move to another.
I cut and reshape other homes. Blown through

by gust or damaged by heavy rain I
abandon. He often grooms himself, cuts
no work on our homes. Some groom and work. My
baby play shapes a broken leaf . Such

sharpen their making skills, use mouth and thumb.
Soon they will be shaping their own homespun.

-Paul Brookes

Sixth Day – Bechstein’s Bat and others

http://www.parc-vosges-nord.fr/html/telechargement/photos.htm

M. lucifugus

Powder snout, fungus-muzzled,
your snuffled rasps mine the sediments,
wake you blink-eyed, gasping, early out
of your torpid seasonal penitence.
You wake alone. Outside winter holds
her grip, as one by one your smudge-nosed
colony stirs and chatters, the whole dank
chamber hacking like a typhus ship
until the hunger rush and you launch unison
on twigged wings out of your encampment’s
mouth to find a frozen, snow-blind land
where no insects fly and no birds sing.
And so return to your waiting roost
where you huddle and hang, fold
back into the nuzzled cloak of yourself,
slowly starve by increments.
Your dopplered heart stalls and stills. Your tiny
claws lose their grip as you slip light as a leaf
to the reliquary floor. As you, my Fledermaus,
will fall out of memory and fall out of myth;
Some old wives’ fairied tale of you catching
in a young girl’s hair or circling a bride
on her wedding eve, portensions of a doomed
romance or a violent end to a nuptial ring.
While a house frau’s batting broom
rests easy by an unlit hearth,
children sleep undisturbed by dreams
of your little teeth at their delicate throats.
* M. lucifugus (little brown bat) faces extinction across North America as a result of a condition named white nose syndrome — a
fungus inadvertently brought from Europe to North America

-Lisa McCabe

The Mammal Sonnets: About Bats: The Chiroptera Sonnets:

A Bechstein’s

I can smell the Tallness Tapper in Dark
of its abandoned home. Come Dark outside
I glean leaves to find food. Once our wings marked
length, breadth of ancient Tallness in our glide.

It is ever less, and so are we. Shear
beak carved out this roost in living Tallness
beside water. Temporary home here
we females move from Tall to Tall Darkness.

He stays out there, sometimes on His own. We
huddle together for warmth in Long Cold.
When we swarm to find Him, to make babies.
We make the New and listen to the Old.

I hear the living Tallnesses tale tell
amongst themselves about who stands who fell.

-Paul Brookes

Fifth Day – Giant Golden-crowned Flying Fox

Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

By the street light

A million thirsty-throated mosquitoes
crowd the street lights.

bats loose themselves
from their topsy-turvey day roosts,
stir the limpid heat.

Purple flowers
open their lightning-boom petals
for the gibbous moon.
Call the myriad mouths
of these night witches close.

They are my darling dreams.

Passing the day in shadow,
rising with the moon,
then, when their feasting is done,
slip upside down
into the leather purse of their
wings, like the richest body.

Black-winged-terrible
spell-casting, all the while.
I watch the street-light
like a moth, to see them dance.

-Susannah Violette

Echolocation

For many nights now I have stood on the threshold
listening.
Watching the sky turn from candle lemon to pink-flecked grey.
Soon you will come
falling from bridges, slipping from roofs.
Escaping the cracks, shoulders pushing through crevices
skin-breathing the valley
the scent of petrichor rolled between your fingers.
You are just a flicker at first
hand-wings like shadow puppets shape shifting
across a newly painted, magnolia bedroom wall.

These days we carry our lives folded like wings.
Carry our friends,
families from room to room. Hug them to us.
Tuck them under our arms.
Place them against our warm cheeks.
Press an ear against the machine.
In solitude, we tap, touch, stroke, click.
Try to navigate distance, obstacles. We hang in rows
amongst bookcases, posters, potted plants, bedside lamps.
Muted and framed in dark caves. We hover over the surface
of our being entombed beneath a surface gloss.

When I opened the door you were there
clinging to the door frame.
The weight of your small body wrapped in the nights’ skin.
Hands outstretched
fingers still clinging on. How long had you been there?
Had you crawled on elbows and knees to watch
as I stood night after night beyond the corridor of trees,
the light from the kitchen shining out into the dark,
the space between your world and mine.
Unable to hear when the dusk loosened your voice,
the clicking of tongues as you passed by.

-Marion Oxley (runner up in the Trim Poetry Competition 2021 judged by Jean O’Brien )

In the space of twenty-five poems Sarah Wimbush encompasses the character and geography of South Yorkshire that, also, has universal themes of change and how we cope with change. From “Strike” to “It’s the backs of things”, she shows a powerful anger for things lost:

“and the model villages

and the churches selling carpets

and the factories turned call centres,

the schoolyards, the ginnels, the smokeless chimneys

and beneath them, beneath all that, those lost men

and all that blackness still down there”

(from “The Lost”)

This is no soppy nostalgia for times long gone, but a sharp, witty analysis of how times, fashions, styles, employment changes a community. Everything becomes something else:

Opposite what was the Manager’s House

and next to the Old Junior School –

the haunt of floorboards creaking

under the early shift’s pit boots

(from “The York, Edlington”)

She explores the language:

“This is the voice. This is the sound of the broad and gubbed,

the Undermen, the too Young, the faced-up, the midnight blue

tattooed. These are mouths fit to burst with faultlines.”

(from “Our Language”)

The geology becomes those who worked it. Reminiscence seamed with TV. Men on the Moon, Your Dad. The list of cars her dad owned, the interiors described precisely by all her senses, the driving lessons “”Dads knuckles tight as wheelnuts” How the cars decayed “Rust rubbed her carcass.” And all that that Mother taught her “A spoonful of sugar or cake helps a fire to catch.”

This book is must re-Read. Something new every time, as is her previous collection: Bloodlines, and her forthcoming collection from Bloodaxe in 2022 called “Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands“

Fourth Day Barbastelle bat / General Bat Poems/Artwork/Photos

On the Wing

Beard of stars, star-beard, Barbastelle,
a little white beard distinguishes you
from Pipistrelle and Daubenton or Serotine.
It sprouts under your face’s dark brown fur.
This face is a gargoyle to fend off evil spirits
taken from the west portal of Chartres. An ageing ET with
a tiny squashed nose, black, round shiny eyes and
enormous white-edged ears, which are needed for echo-location,
your tracking of nocturnal insect life.
This combination of fur and wing disturbs like good surrealism.
Your tessellated wings in out-stretch are so fine,
they must have inspired Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome,
or at least the umbrella. And yes, you are a quadruped:
your front and rear stump-limbs elongate elegantly
into two rapturous wings,
which are huge in proportion to your kind-of-cosy furred body.
The three gently angled divisions of each wing
are surfaced in honeycomb mottling. The only mammal to fly.
This is, after all, a miracle.

-Alison Dunhill

Chiroptera

A dark shred of disbelief attaches itself to a white
nightgown, throat clutched like a fist, she is alone

with the bat. Trapped in her room past midnight
and no one to wake for help. Illicit fingers steal her

peace, and he quivers, waiting.
She pities him, his radar found wanting. Little, by little,

she unfreezes, moves to the window, clings to the curtain.
The bat has spread leathery wings like her old hands, full

of instinct, and she sits for hours in the window, high
in the glass tower; an ageing princess, with her one suitor.

Her start, as the light clicks off, brings the bat from his dreams,
he swoops to life

and she screams the meaning of hers out into the night.

-Sarah Wallis

-Andy McGregor

About Bats: The Chiroptera Sonnets

Barbastelle

All our food have ears, so we must use stealth.
They hear our echoes, make their own so we
hear theirs and think it ours. We must change depth
of our echo so they cannot hear. Free

to hunt, until they find new ways to stop
us. In flight I glean water as I skim
it, flit quick, echo up at Tallness top.
New echo works. Food is no longer thin.

Dark colder sooner. In Long Cold we must
enter Slow Time. Heart to few from many
beats, gathered together in Hard Dark roost.
All flitterers we ate feed our bellies.

Come Long Warm this heart will beat quicker, these
wings unfold hungry for flight and release.

-Paul Brookes

Bios And Links

-Alison Dunhill

Originally a Londoner, Alison Dunhill had a poetry pamphlet published in her early twenties in Paul Brown’s Trans Gravity Advertiser, 1972. She was also published in Martin Stannard’s Joe Soap’s Canoe #15 in 1992. She was tutored at the Arvon Foundation by Michael Laskey and Martin Stannard in the early 1990s, and has given readings at Pentameters, St Catherine’s College, Oxford, St James’s Piccadilly and Torriano Meeting House. Having moved to Norfolk in the new millennium, she has participated in open mikes at Fenspeak in King’s Lynn and Ely, Café Writers in Norwich and at CB1@CB2 in Cambridge. She has participated in almost ten years of stimulating workshops with Sue Burge. Sue acted as mentor for my forthcoming SurVision chapbook. She had two pieces longlisted for the Fish Flash Fiction Prize in March this year. Two of her poems are published in the current issue of SurVision magazine (July 2020) and two are  published in the December 2020 issue of Fenland Poetry Journal. She won Second Prize in the James Tate International Poetry Prize, 2020 and has a consequent chapbook forthcoming in 2021.  She has always worked concurrently in the visual arts and in recent years is incorporating poetry into her art practice. An art historian too, her MPhil thesis forges links between interwar surrealism and 1970s US photography (please see her WikiPedia entry).

Third Day 30th. Mexican Free-tailed Bat/ General Bat Poems/Artwork/Photos,

-Palma McKeown.

Bat in the House

How it got in we will never know
but getting it safe outside again
was not easy. Bats don’t fly,
they swoop, with such pure grace.

It first appeared in the kitchen
describing arcs. We opened the skylights,
turned off lights, closed doors
to help it find its way back to air

And thought we’d done it. Next night
it appeared again, perhaps slept
in daylight on the dresser top.
The pipistrelle glided into the hall

and skimmed its way upstairs
in a few wing beats. Hastily closing doors
I followed it to close doors up there,
turn off the lights, open landing window.

I had not gone out. It lay exhausted
on the carpet, until my husband
tenderly picked it up, placed it
outside on the extension roof.

We knew bats could not take off
from the ground, like other winged things.
Next morning it was no longer there.
It must have been hungry, exhausted.

Important not to invest human emotions
in an innocent creature. It didn’t visit us
nor convey any blessings. It was simply
in the wrong place to survive.

-Angela Topping

On Mexican Free-Tailed 1/3 Mating

To feed my baby I hunt from Lightdark
to Darklight. I remember its making.
He slowly, comes on grabs Her at the start
always by ear, the jaw, or neck, pulling

Her out of our crowd, moves onto Her back
biting scruff of Her neck. Holds Her. She yanks
away , He chirps faintly. She squeaks. Now back
with us Her face wounds bleed. She is pregnant.

He moves slowly onto my back, His ears
held low and eyes closed.. No neck-biting or
calls. I do not resist; I groom myself, my ears,
or sleep. Cold Time comes so we fly to Warm.

I give birth clinging upside down to stark
Dark thumbs and feet grasp. It wont fall to Dark.

-Paul Brookes

Mexican Free-Tailed 2/3 Suckling

My baby is born naked, eyes open.
I carefully clean and nurse it. New-born
attached to me by thread. It’ll be eaten
if it falls Below by hard scuttlers brawn.

I won’t rescue it. We learn each other’s
scent and voice before we separate. I
pull away to dislodge Bloodsac, unmother.
When dried it falls off child.Tenacious, my

young use large feet and thumbs to hold on to
Hard. It’s tiny sharp teeth cling to mothers
or others. I put it among young, who
squeak, jostle, and crawl over each other.

After Hunt, find its call, muzzle top of it’s head,
sniff, talk, raise my folded wing. It’s breastfed.
-Paul Brookes

A Mexican Free-Tailed 3/3 First Flight

I avoid several mid-air crashes
a breath. Rely on my untested guide
senses. Break my wings, get Belowed bashes
I’ll be swarmed, stripped to bone in a breath’s Wide.

First time I flew outside with our swarm, told
to watch for feathered claws that lie in wait
I found my first winged hard case, snatched by bold
one who jammed my echo. Learnt my mistake.

When Cold Time arrives we will fly to Warm.
Gather outside entry to our Dark Home.
We will rise upwards, our gust makers form
shapes in air in flight to our second Home.

We must rest and hang the journey, refresh.
Mother says new home’s food is tasty, fresh.

-Paul Brookes