{"id":49,"date":"2023-10-19T08:54:23","date_gmt":"2023-10-19T08:54:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/innverse\/?p=49"},"modified":"2023-10-19T08:56:01","modified_gmt":"2023-10-19T08:56:01","slug":"goldfinches-by-simon-rennie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/innverse\/2023\/10\/19\/goldfinches-by-simon-rennie\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;goldfinches&#8217; by Simon Rennie"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>Read at Inn Verse February 2021<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<pre class=\"wp-block-preformatted\">goldfinches\n\nwhen I was a child I lived by a park\nand the dark dirty city \ndarker and dirtier then\nseemed to end at the end of my street\n\npigeons and sparrows were street birds \nwhose bald chicks would fall from gutters\nand lie prone big-eyed and startled \nfor toddlers to poke with sticks\n\nbut the birds in the park were different\ntheir bald chicks fell from real nests\nand were sucked back into the soil\nand no-one saw their scrawny necks\n\nI had a little book of british birds\nso old its pictures were called plates\nonly some of the plates were colour\nand this made those birds special\n\none birthday my dad took me to town\nto the big camera shop with the big windows\neverything was for looking through and at\nand my dad said ornithologists had binoculars\n\nthe man tried to sell us some small ones\nsmall for birds and small for boys\nbut my dad insisted we get the big ones\n16 bi 50 they\u2019re the ones we want\n\nthe man said we could spot planes with them\nor the mountains of the moon\nI just thought the birds would look bigger\nand I liked that all binoculars were plural\n\nI had two favourite birds in the little book\nboth with colour plates of course\none big and one small but both gold\nand exotic in their own way\n\nI couldn\u2019t believe these animals\nlived in the same country as me\nthe golden eagle was fierce and noble\nthe goldfinch seemed designed by genius\n\nI used to draw the golden eagle \nin profile with its vicious hooked\nyellow beak and its neck feathers \nso big you could make them out\n\nI never tried to draw the goldfinch\nI knew I would never do it justice\nthat it would look like I\u2019d made\nsuch a thing up to impress\n\nthe next year they brought in a law\nto clean up the air everywhere\nand all the two-up-two-downs\nfor miles around had to change their coal\n\nwhen the chimneys stopped smoking\nand blackening the terraced streets\nit was like the birds woke up\nor came back off holiday\n\nmy lenses began slowly to fill\nwith birds I had never seen\nand I even didn\u2019t mind so much\nthat the binoculars were so heavy to lift\n\none day in the park at the top of my street\nI saw a flash of gold in a poplar tree \nmy heart beat fast as I found the focus\nit wasn\u2019t an eagle of course\n\nbut that day a truth was confirmed\ngoldfinches did live in the same country as me\nand they were designed by genius\nand I still didn\u2019t want to try to draw one\n\nI didn\u2019t see another one for years\nand then I began to see more\nI still never got used to their sparkle\nto that concentrated detail of colour\n\nnow I live in the country\nand just before I wrote this\na dozen goldfinches flew from a conifer\nin the garden and swerved above me\n\neach of them reminds me of the first I saw\nin the flesh and feather and in the book\nthey definitely deserve a colour plate\nand I\u2019ve still never seen a golden eagle\n\n\n<\/pre>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Simon Rennie is Associate Professor of Victorian Poetry at the University of Exeter. He co-founded Inn Verse in 2007 and has hosted it off and on ever since.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Read at Inn Verse February 2021 goldfinches when I was a child I lived by a park and the dark dirty city darker and dirtier then seemed to end at the end of my street pigeons and sparrows were street birds whose bald chicks would fall from gutters and lie prone big-eyed and startled for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1307,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>&#039;goldfinches&#039; by Simon Rennie - Inn Verse<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/innverse\/2023\/10\/19\/goldfinches-by-simon-rennie\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&#039;goldfinches&#039; 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