The Sunday Poem: Mineral by Kathleen Jamie

A kingfisher darts upriver

– cobalt and copper –

ignoring the factory-site’s

asset-stripped acres,

the pioneer birches

testing its contaminated ground.

It’s gone – maybe a youngster,

this being dispersal season

and how the offspring scatter

as though a whistle shrilled.

There are mineral mines in Zambia

– so flies global capital –

do the Malachite kingfishers there

subsist in acid-sickened waters?

And where are our sons and daughters

now the first snows of winter

dust the high hills west?

Where is our kingfisher?

Unseen nearby, a reed bends

beneath her scintilla of weight.

The fisher-bird sees through surfaces.

The river is planes of light.

Kathleen Jamie’s most recent collection is The Keelie Hawk: Poems in Scots

Illustration by Chris Riddell