Rookie
by Caroline Bird
You thought you could ride a bicycle
but, turns out, those weren’t bikes
they were extremely bony horses. And that wasn’t
a meal you cooked, that was a microwaved
hockey puck. And that wasn’t a book that was
a taco stuffed with daisies. What if
you thought you could tie your laces?
But all this time you were just wrapping
a whole roll of sellotape round your shoe and
hoping for the best? And that piece of paper
you thought was your tax return?
A crayon drawing of a cat. And your best friend
is actually a scarecrow you stole from a field
and carted away in a wheelbarrow.
Your mobile phone is a strip of bark
with numbers scratched into it.
Thousands of people have had to replace
their doors, at much expense, after you
battered theirs to bits with a hammer
believing that was the correct way
to enter a room. You’ve been pouring pints
over your head. Playing card games with a pack
of stones. Everyone’s been so confused
by you: opening a bottle of wine with a cutlass,
lying on the floor of buses, talking to
babies in a terrifyingly loud voice.
All the while nodding to yourself like
‘Yeah, this is how it’s done.’
Planting daffodils in a bucket of milk.
From The Air Year. Reproduced with kind permission from Carcanet.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Winner Best Collection 2020
The Air Year
Caroline Bird
About Caroline Bird
Caroline Bird (b. 1986, Leeds) intended the title of her collection The Air Year to refer to the first year of a relationship, ‘the anniversary prior to paper / for which ephemeral gifts are traditional’; in the year of coronavirus, it has taken on an eerie double meaning.
She writes: ‘I’m fascinated with the idea that poetry is about inserting a mystery into the reader’s life not clarifying one, that by the end of a poem you should know less than you did when you started, that a poem is a kind of amnesia injection that makes the immediate world strange again.’
Bird’s previous collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award; she is also a playwright, whose credits include The Trial of Dennis the Menace and a new translation of The Trojan Women.
Read reviews of The Air Year in The Guardian and The Telegraph.
