Nowhere Near Kosovo

Nowhere near Kosovo, thousands of peroxide blondes
Have kept me company all day,
Lying around seductive in the sunshine
Or striking typical New Testament attitudes
Straight out of manger scenes in Bethlehem -
Baa-faced bleaters with their newly born

Alone all day, I didn't lack companionship,
Walking from Flotterstone to Glencourse Reservoir.
I climbed the Auld Kirk Road zigzagging upwards
Above Loganlee over Carnethy Hill and Turnhouse Hill
Before dropping down again to the burbling burn,
Past the old filter beds to the carpark where I'd started from.

Nowhere near Kosovo, it was birdsong, birdsong all the way.
A dozen milk-white doves on the eaves warbled and cooed,
Oblivious to the gunshots ratatatting from the firing range.
Skylarks and pipits twittered overhead. Bright on the railing,
Bold as brass, a companionable robin gave me the eye.
Wagtails and water-ousels dipped. A swallow seduced me

With its long forked tail, its chestnut throat and dark blue sheen.
Three cushie doos clattered off into the woods and a foreign
Visitor - a whippoorwill on holiday, perhaps? A kookaburra? -
Mocked me derisively. Mallard and teal sqattered and aquaplaned
And from the long cow parsley, exotic as Scheherezade
Or the Queen of Sheba, a burnished, golden pheasant,

Nowhere near Kosovo, magnificently materialised.
From the bridge I gave mute blessing to a mother swan,
Tutoring two cygnets in the art of stateliness and wondered,
Why only two? Immobile in a corner of the reeds, a lonely
Heron stood, a solitary, grey, fixated undertaker, blood-brother
To the fishermen, standing all afternoon, casting for sunbeams

As, a hundred yards away, midges and trout scored bullseyes
On the limpid surface of the glittering loch.
Butterflies settled on foxgloves, danced a minuet
On a carpet of buttercups buzzing with honeybees.
Spurred by the sweetness of the day, by life's delirium,
A stallion whinnied and careered around its enclosure.

The hillside swarmed with rabbits, celebrating their immunity
From chemical bombardment. When I clapped my hands,
A thousand scut missiles divebombed the underground
Shelters. Nancy, too, has kept me company, who loved this walk
And died at sixty-two under the surgeon's knife. Unfair,
Unfair, possessing paradise all to myself, nowhere near Kosovo.

Norman Bissett

This poem was first published in the Diss Writers' 2000 Open Anthology