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“