A detail of the front cover of ‘The Bonniest Companie’. Art by Olivia Lomenech Gill

	One of the Central Park
			red-tailed hawks is
	hunched in a leafless maple
	pecking at a polythene bag.
	When it flies its talons
			entangle in the plastic
		so it plunges head down
			 — dreadful winged pendulum —
	and everyone gasps,
		but with three strong wingbeats
	it frees itself and soars
			(Where they nestin’? someone asks,
	I heard on Dakota, this year)
	above the American Natural History Museum.

	At the pondside hop hermit thrush,
	fox-  and swamp-sparrow
		and elsewhere in the Ramble
	 sounds a tiny NYPD siren
			— a starling, high in a red oak. 

Taken from the collection ‘The Bonniest Companie’, published on 8 October by Picador. Available to purchase in the Caught by the River shop.