• Skip to main content
  • Skip to header right navigation
  • Skip to site footer
The Friday Poem

The Friday Poem

A poem every Friday

  • The Frip
  • About
    • Masthead
    • Contributors
  • FAQ
  • Archive
    • Search the archive
    • Friday Poems
    • Reviews
    • Features
  • Subscribe
  • Submit a poem

The Friday Poem on 09/07/21

‘Flying the Lanner’ is an unpublished poem from Tony Curtis’ forthcoming collection, Leaving the Hills. We chose it for its assured and confident voice, and the way it paints such a clear and unflinching picture of the falcon in captivity, from the its diet of day-old chicks to the gift of ‘hoodwinked’ in the last line. It’s a poem that fires on all cylinders, with its own exquisite patterning and precise engineering, and we are thrilled to have it.

Flying the Lanner

A ball of clawed and beaked fluff in the cage:

first she must walk
and then run
and then learn to fly
but only to Griff, who is her mother
and the only mother she will ever know.

There is no love lost
for Griff’s voice and whistle mean food –
day-old chicks, yellow and fresh and soft –
a gloved banquet until she is fed up
and needs to do no more.

Griff’s love is real, an arm’s length love, 
an arm-long perch she’ll fly to,
land on, ride on claw-tight.
All this is to come; first she’ll cast her fluff and grow,
stiffen her bones and press out her wings:

the most exquisite patterning, the most precise 
engineering. She’ll scuttle 
across the grass after him, blink 
at the endless sky, follow that chick smell,
until she’s ready for him to fly her.

Then the cast of the lure, the widening gyre
the soft flesh and early bones,
as her reward. She’ll bounce her weight
on his arm, grip the glove,
safe in her hoodwinked love.

Tony Curtis is a poet, critic and editor. He is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at the University of South Wales where he established Creative Writing in the 1980s and directed the M.Phil In Writing for many years. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1972 and the National Poetry Prize in 1984, and was given the Dylan Thomas Award in 1993 and a Cholmondeley Award in 1997. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2001, and in 2004 he was awarded the first D.Litt. by the University of Glamorgan. His eleventh collection, Leaving the Hills (Seren Books) is out next year.

Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on Email

Read this next

Inheritance

Inheritance

by Sharon Phillips — our Friday Poem on 07/01/22

Site Footer

MENU

  • About us
  • FAQ
  • Submit a poem
  • Contact
  • Privacy
  • Mentions Légales
  • THE FRIP

    The Frip is The Friday Poem’s reviews and features magazine. We run book reviews, profiles, interviews, essays, lyric essays and other features of interest to poets and readers of poetry. Read the Frip here.

    NEWSLETTER

    Why not sign up for our weekly newsletter and never miss a Friday Poem again? Pop your email address in the box and click the button.

    Copyright © 2023 · The Friday Poem · All Rights Reserved · follow the Friday Poem on Twitter · follow the Friday Poem on Facebook