In his green fatigues and his belt of hand grenades
you’d forget Eddie is just a fledgling,
a squab in SpongeBob socks due home for Birds Eye
fish fingers and chips, for dinner at six.
Last we’d heard he’d gone off Reservation
–a glimmer flickering at the edge

out beyond the boundary hedge,
where he sits on the burned-out wreck of a Honda Civic
that once turned loops on The Green
before being redeemed by hogweed pushing through the floor,
a wren nesting in the panel of its door
and Eddie weaving a new pattern for the estate
from the common, from the bitter vetch,
from the fields of self-heal and nettle.

Keith Payne is a poet, translator and editor. Whales and Whales, from the Galician of Luisa Castro, is published by Skein Press. He is curator of the Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill Poetry Exchange. Today’s poem is from his recent collection, Savage Acres (Dedalus Press)