It’s there on the crumbling soft-stone cliff top

when you walk up and over, past peregrine squall

and wren-hedge and gull-sky out over the wide

Channel down below all the way to France.

Maybe it was just a project for children—

to do something with their collected feathers,

a mass of feathers, while staying at the caravan

over the half term, the parents not wanting

the mites and the oil and whatnot to crawl out

on the journey home. Or perhaps it was intended

as shocking as it was, maybe some druid

lives around here, wanting to put the scare

of the ancient into us soft moderners,

us who have lost our nature connections

and have crept into the sleepy embrace

of the urban. All it took was a fence post

fixed all over with feathers—crow,

tail, cockerel, flight, sea, magpie, pigeon—

fastened in clumps, quill down, vane rampant,

each barb dryly trembling in the stiff breeze

as if crying out to take off, wanting to carve air

instead of this human-caught, wood-stuck,

earth-fixed totem. It gave you a shiver

of time, of the elemental, that you shook off,

but remembered, as you picked your way back

over the land-slide and eroded path to home.