Green Bee-eater
by Pascale Petit
More precious than all
the gems of Jaipur –
the green bee-eater.
If you see one singing
tree-tree-tree
with his space-black bill
and rufous cap,
his robes
all shades of emerald
like treetops glimpsed
from a plane,
his blue cheeks,
black eye-mask
and the delicate tail streamer
like a plume of smoke –
you might dream
of the forests
that once clothed
our flying planet.
And perhaps his singing
is a spell
From Tiger Girl. Reproduced with kind permission from Bloodaxe Books.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2020
Tiger Girl
Pascale Petit
About Pascale Petit
Pascale Petit (b. 1953, Paris) was converted to poetry aged 16, when her teacher recited Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Her subsequent years as a sculptor and artist allowed her to develop connections between poetry and the visual and tactile, but her aim remained the same: like Keats, ‘to create a forest the reader could walk into and see and hear even in the dark’.
Tiger Girl is a departure for Petit; her imaginative landscapes have shifted from the Amazon rainforest which characterised earlier collections including Fauverie and Mama Amazonica to the forests of Ranthambhore in Rajasthan, near her grandmother’s birthplace, beautiful and full of life but threatened by poaching, deforestation and climate change. She draws attention to ‘how our endangered wild is endangering all life on the planet including ourselves’, while leaving room for a sense of awe and astonishment: ‘how can we destroy such wonders?’
