TV Dinners

On velvet wings a spectral owl, as white
and sombre as a ghost, flaps silently
into the night. Its ravening chicks, snug
amid pellets, feathers, gunge and bones, re-
gurgitate rat fricassee.

Riding the atmosphere, a mile or so
above the moor, suspended motionless,
with only its wingtips quivering,
a peregrine sights movements far below.
It immediately converts into a thunderbolt,
and stoops to massacre some rash, foolhardy,
unsuspecting vole.

Sea-eagles soar aloft on pinioned sails,
talons like tempered steel. Below, a swarm
of pullulating pink, a million swan-necked
calabashes raised on stilts, sift acid water
upside down and strut on fragile filaments.
The eagles swoop, lowering inexorable
undercarriages, select their victims randomly
and rugby tackle them around these feeble
stalks. Pink coils are clenched in iron fists, heads
forced beneath the acid water, upside down, until
the threshing ends.

High over Serengeti, scores of vultures
wheel and wheel, then telegraph a bulletin
about the stricken carcass of a buffalo.
Hunched like obscene umbrellas round
its fly-blown corpse, they insinuate their
naked turkey heads below its collapsing
plimsoll line into a cornucopia of guts
and giblets, blancmange and sweetbreads,
to emerge, red-faced and blinking, dragging
a lump of curdled liver and a length
of bilious, green intestine.

These David Attenborough films are quite remarkable.
Another After Eight, perhaps?

Norman Bissett