There was a sudden and prolonged smattering –
some of the chimney’s ancient debris
falling lightly to earth – in the grate
close to my desk, then a clattering
against the metal back of the gas fire,
a shuffling of feathers, a scratching of claws.
I stopped writing. I guessed that a top heavy
wood pigeon – one of a number that perches
unsteadily on our gutters and ridges
and chimney pots – had toppled down the gloom
filled now with the rattle of broken brickwork.
To disconnect the gas, unscrew the fire
from its backing plate and have the dazed brute
flap around the laptop or find the creature
entombed beneath a tumulus of grime
was never really an option and yet,
for days, with the continuing chatter
of falling bits of masonry the bird
might have set bouncing off the brick-lined chimney,
my conscience was troubled: there was something
uncivic taking no action about what,
by then, must have been a death in a hearth,
putting aside the seeming indifference
to the dying. But supposing I had been
some latter day, domestic Howard Carter
and opened the tomb, filling the room with soot,
and found the bird had flown?
By David Selzer