I. Dawn a9 a9 a9 Cruck-hoo! Cruck-hoo!—the disyllabic chime that pries Vernal’s eyelid. A twin-tongued gong the colour of wet bronze, swung by a bird with no watch and all the time.
II. Anatomy of a Trickster Feather-coat: rain-cloud tweed. Beak: a borrowed door-knocker. Heart: pendulum-quick, chanting tick-tock in the dark. Soul: broodborrow brujo, planting its fate-seed in other throats.
III. Ode in Five Echo-Eggs
- Timeloomer—your call unspools the clockspring coil, rewinding winter’s cold-chronicle. We owe you the green eruption.
- Nest-negotiator—you ghost into stranger-straw, slip an echoegg beneath their warm credulity. You teach the world unearned love.
- Cuckoolyric—you curve air into perfect minor third, a melody simple enough for stone, complex enough for longing.
- Sundial-flinter—you flit from hedge to hedge, chiselling noon onto shadow; the orchard’s hourhand is your wing.
- Perpetua-wander—you never finish a home, yet every coppice is your cradle chorus.
IV. Antiphon of the Hostlings Who raises whom? Reed-warbler mothers belt cracked lullabies to alien heirs, their own blood running unnoticed into the grass. Thus the planet practices radical hospitality while lamenting the rent.
V. Mid-Summer Refrain Cruck-hoo… cruck-hoo… the syllables stretch, melt, drizzle through evening like candle-wax. Lovers count them, letting each pair of beats trade blush for dusk.
VI. Autumn’s Empty Pocket When you vanish southward, the hedges feel suddenly untimed, clocks without hands. The cuckoo-clock’s door stays shut; the figurine fell silent: proof that absence is its own hour.
VII. Coda for the Clock-Thief Carry our seconds gently, dusk-hitchhiker. When you return, break them open like seed-husks, so we may sprout again through the marrow of March.
—fin—