A Jackdaw Falls Down the Chimney

And the young boy, your uncle, raises it and nurses it back to health.

You tell it with a knowing edge, anticipate my gentle teasing. A story so full of bucolic, old world charm

it almost sketches itself in rough pencilled lines inside the book. We relate in this way, trading

our country stories, mine perhaps a little dimmer, mostly second hand. In yours I’m drawn over hills

down into old valleys, to somewhere that shines like memory I lack and half remember the smell of.