City Scrapes (on walking through Pigeon Park)

by Samantha Xia Symonds

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When you return to the city
on a raw Tuesday, the chip cones sing
of gulls. Back here;

slicing through
streets, bruising under
office blocks

sometimes, the urbangrey blurs
into green static, the world softens
around the edges, just
someone’s smartphone

periphery on the daily
commute

up close
becomes fireworks of cow parsley in your lashes,

groundsel sunnying cracks between the pavement,
plane trees lamenting
seasons,
even,

a weekend bird senses
the bracken beyond the buildings and tastes
its berries black, sometimes;

bloodied skin fades to green, eventually;

pigeons are colours
away from doves;

everything becomes beautiful when you return.

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I was surprised to find this poem tricky to write, especially considering the impact urban wild and greenspaces have had on my personal and professional life. Being assigned the habitat by 26 was fitting – geographically I was back in the urban home I grew up in, but I’d spent my adulthood trying to escape it. I wanted to explore the seeming oxymoron of urban nature, but to do so had to face my own internal ambivalence and resolve an identity crisis I hadn’t realised I was having.

‘My city’ of Birmingham is the second biggest in the UK; the youngest in Europe; one of the most diverse; and yet it wasn’t easy for me to identify with. The city had been a site of many life lessons, learnt the hard way. So when I left it in 2016, I found respite in spending time as a rock climber, dive instructor and conservationist in the tropics. Exploring green spaces and deep seas, I saw the world with childlike wonder, enjoying a meditative appreciation for the present. But like many others, I was brought back to my hometown with the pandemic and became transfixed with memories of the past.

My inner narrative felt fragmented; it was hard to meld my home-office life with an adventuring and sun-seeking identity. I’d been a shark conservationist in Fiji’s mangroves, an animal rescue guide in Koh Lanta, a ray-feeder and aquarist in the Whitsundays… but at the time of receiving 26’s brief, was on a very different type of island. I was ‘stranded’ from that lifestyle.

Being locked down in Birmingham, then assigned an urban habitat seemed symbolic of feeling trapped by the city. I found solace in John Mark Green’s ‘Taste the Wild Wonder: Poems’, from which I borrowed the italicised lines in my piece.

I thought of “Pigeon Park” in Birmingham; greenery surrounding a cathedral at the centre of the city’s business district. Adults commuted through it, teenagers partied in it, but I wondered how few people stopped to enjoy the flora and fauna of it.

To have gone out seeking the wilderness I now missed, some seeds must have been planted from my own urban experiences in parks and aquariums, showing a glimpse or simulacra of the wider reality. Growing up in the most landlocked major city in the UK had lent me the curiosity to seek new horizons, the resilience to build a new life and the humility to come home.