A bird flying east asks a bird flying west what lies ahead and gets an answer that sounds like the end of the world: "naught but the nests / of the old human race, who are dead." James Hutchings turns the usual view of ruins upside down. Instead of people gazing at a lost civilisation, animals puzzle over us, and they cannot quite make sense of what they find.
The title is also the first line, so the poem starts like a fable or the setup of a joke, and the rhythm backs that up. The lines bounce along in a galloping, anapaestic beat ("There is NAUGHT but the NESTS of the OLD human RACE"), with longer lines alternating with shorter ones. The rhymes are tidy and nursery-like: *clouds* and *aloud*, *legs* and *eggs*, *doubt* and *out*. The first stanza is looser, since *west* and *nests* only half-rhyme. This singsong shape makes the news of extinction sound like casual gossip, and the gap between tone and subject is where much of the poem's unease comes from.
The middle stanzas are gently comic. The birds can only understand humans through what they already know. We are "builders, like ants, but they walked on two legs, / like a bird." The idea that we "didn't lay eggs" is dismissed as "absurd," which is funny because to a bird, live birth really would be the strangest thing about us. The western bird's knowledge is hearsay ("I've heard it from some"), and the eastern bird admits that "I thoroughly doubt / there is anyone left who would know." Between them they show how a whole species can shrink into rumour once no witnesses remain. Even the time scale is bird-sized: the humans vanished "all those seasons ago."
The poem then pauses. The birds "rested awhile and they looked at the clouds / and the grass, and the birds in between." The line is calm and ordinary, and it suggests that the living world carries on perfectly well without us.
The last two stanzas change the mood. Once the eastern bird reaches the city, the language gets heavier and slower. The "tall, tilting tombs" begin with a hard, repeated *t*, and the word *tombs* quietly corrects the earlier "nests." Humans have become "two-legged beasts," while their buildings "squatted," as if they were heavy animals themselves. The line ends on a slow run of *and*s: "silent and crumbling and vast."
The final stanza leans on one phrase, repeated four times: "no word for concrete and no word for steel / and no word for this forest of stone." The repetition mimics the bird's helplessness. Its language, shaped by nests and seasons, has nothing that fits, so the poem's own comparison of the city to a "forest of stone" reads like the closest image that natural vocabulary can offer. The last line, "very fleeting and small and alone," chains three adjectives together, and the bird seems to shrink as they pile up. The silence of the city makes the bird feel the brevity of any life, not only its own.
The poem never says how the humans died. The birds can't find out, and neither can we, and that gap is its most pointed move. We are the only readers who recognise concrete and steel, so we cannot treat the story as someone else's. Readers who know Shelley's "Ozymandias" will recognise the old theme of ruined greatness, but Hutchings tells it in a lighter, odder voice, through creatures who don't know what they're looking at.
That is why the poem is worth reading. It uses a fable's simplicity and a comic rhythm to deliver a serious thought without lecturing. Everything we build to last is only as lasting as the understanding of whoever finds it, and in the end the poem asks what will be left of our words when nobody remains to read them.