stoop (verb) to lower oneself by unworthy behaviour, to descend from dignity, by Emma Dandy

Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore at Margate (Study for Rockets and Blue Lights), by JMW Turner (England) c. 1840

stoop (verb) to lower oneself by unworthy behaviour, to descend from dignity
 
I’m up early and running along Richmond Hill. I think I can hear another jogger’s footfalls behind me, but when I look back along the road I can’t see anyone. Maybe it’s just the echo of my steps bouncing off the houses. I turn onto the path that snakes down to the Thames. In front of me stretches London’s Eden, the only view protected by an Act of Parliament. The vista, so loved by Turner he returned to it again and again, stops me dead. A row of memory benches, each carved with many names, lines the road. What’s rustling in the bushes? Down and contour feathers freckle the grass, the only remains of some bird consumed here. As the dawn red spreads I wonder how its colour distorted in the year with no summer. The passage of time has barely changed this place, it’s all trees, grass and river. But the eruption which shook the other side of the globe altered the hue of Turner’s skies. Ash darkened the sun. We spent hours last month watching as the waves broke against the lee shore at Margate. Did the onshore squall whip up the sand that buried us? I cleaved from you there. I have not answered any of your calls, or replied to your stream of messages, and tomorrow I will take the clothes you left to a charity shop. I look up at the clouds as a swallow glides towards the river. She’s quick, avoiding most predators, but the peregrine in his diving stoop is the fastest animal. He plunges, she evades, he rises and drops again. His clenched talon is a door slamming to break her wing. He twists and grabs her mid-air then drags her to the grass. We never said goodbye. Her tail feathers, forked like a serpent’s tongue, forced open. I never said this was over. He’s ready to eat. He’s plucked her clean and laid her out, guts opened.
 
Emma Dandy

Emma Dandy is a poet working in Birmingham and writing to explore trauma and complex relationships. Publication of her debut pamphlet - I Laid Out Knives, Guns and Razors - is forthcoming with Hedgehog Poetry Press. You can find her on Instagram @emmadandypoetry