Gowk
By Simon Armitage
Published 1 August 2024
One day I had no soul and the next
I did, like a cuckoo’s egg, so
then I was lumped with this baby ego
hatching out of the heart’s nest,
always wanting the first prize,
hungry for kind words,
gorging on treats and rewards
till it sat there bloated with praise
the size and weight of a black-bellied bustard,
but still a cuckoo speaking its trash talk,
singing its two-note coo-cooing piss-take,
an insatiable overgrown overblown bastard.
I held out my hand and offered the dry bread of
honest love and it bit my head off.
The further I travel the more I seem to write about home. And the more I’m told the world in is in turmoil the more I want to look into myself. And the more I’m told that rhyme is an antiquated and restrictive device…here are some more. Who was it said that between a good cause and a good poem there’s a thousand miles of burning desert and not many people willing to cross it? Gowk is a North of England word for a cuckoo apparently, though I’m as northern as they come and I’ve never heard anyone use it. Neither have I heard a cuckoo this year, a consequence of the environmental catastrophes taking place on several fronts. The cuckoo is the emblematic bird of the village of Marsden where I grew up; I won’t go into the details but the meaning of the legend is that we’re all idiots. I’ve been writing a series of sonnets about my relationship with my soul, and I think Cuckoo will be the title of the collection when it eventually appears, or maybe Cucu, the original thirteenth century Old French word. Is there an Australian cuckoo? The bird occupies an unusual place in both ornithology and myth. Its parasitical habits are well known and have given the species a bad rep, though I guess getting another creature to raise your young is also a kind of genius, and the speed at which the female delivers the egg into the nests of much smaller birds is scarcely believable. So it’s a surprise that the word cuckoo has also come to mean stupid, and it’s that duality which I associate with the soul and the body in the poem, as epitomized by its unmistakable call, a simple two-note ding-dong, both humble and chilling. I’m here, hello, watch out.
Remember: people aren’t as interested in you as you are. Readers want writing. Write a poem about your first memory without using the word “I”.
Simon Armitage
#30in30 writing prompt
I think language is the greatest device ever invented, and gets us closer to an understanding of ourselves and deeper into that mystery, and poetry is language at its keenest.
Simon Armitage
#30in30 #PoetryMonth
