Foxy poem

Red Runner is the second poem in my first book, Thirteen Ways of Looking At the Highlands, published by Diehard in 1996. It's a nature poem, based around my observations of foxes. I used to see them regularly, in the Bathgate Hills and in the Calder Wood Country Park, when I lived in Bathgate and Mid Calder respectively. I think that with nature poems you have be true to the realities of the nature you're describing, but you also have to go beyond that, to bring in your personal reaction to the natural world, and maybe to make a general point from the particular. Nature poems should never be just about nature. I've gone on to write a lot more nature poems, mostly based on my own experience of creatures and their habitats, but I also think you can bring in your theoretical knowledge. I've never seen siamangs in the jungle, but I've written about them.

Red runner

Beautifully camouflaged, he thinks,

against the bright sprouting wheat,

the spring fox stalks two knowing rooks.

They wait, and lift, crop-forward

into the wind,

and he tailstreams over the field,

pretending indifference,

to the edging trees

in search of an unready vole.

Fail or kill, the habit hones the skill.

I've seen his relations often;

the dog-fox spinning and leaping

in Calder Wood's new snow,

or the vixen who notes and ignores me,

driven by the imperative

of her cubs' hunger.

I'm an irrelevance in a green jacket;

I unleash no terriers.

Or another, panting on a warm rock,

snapping at bluebottles,

guarding her smelly den among the gorse.

Eyes glow in the headlights

as they stand and look at you,

super-foxing towards them,

and too often they are dirty red scraps

flat on the road.

But see him run through the hill's rippling grass,

ears up and tongue out,

intent, fixed, on a swerving quest,

or hear a pair yip on a still November night,

and know you've met a light and lively being,

the essence of pursuit,

that pointed face where fear and fierceness fuse.

Copyright  © Colin Will 1996