Bluebells bloom from the refuse heap, Plait a crown for broken pots and leaves. Grass blades weave: in-out. Beetles dart – come in come out! – through the dandelion gridlock. Beating hearts; butterfly eggs on nettle beds. Moth wings. Shining things. Fireflies breed in luminous excess behind the potting shed. Night dark, quick start, bats […]
People Need Nature 2016
mynydd y graig
hill seethes with rain bone festering with moss wind scraping it raw sweated and curled with furze and fern hill is carcass hollowed out ribs holding the sky buried under clouds, only its shadow visible like a whale underwater invasions of plant life: hill is bruised with heather and gorse hill is labour pangs, crystallized […]
dandelion clock
held between forefinger and thumb: the stem like a green vein, and balanced above—time as an exploded diagram. see the hours stellated, the minutes anatomised as spokes of a wheel that does not turn, struts to hold up this whispered globe of wishes. between fingernails you pluck one from its earth the way you’d dissect […]
Twenty tourists in a motor boat watching marine plankton bioluminesce
Tree Talk
We are taller than your most extravagant tales. A drawn-out note on a mellowed cello Describes our skin, Our bark, roughened under wind and sun Ripples more slowly than the eye can follow. We are water, wood, sunlight; We are tree. We sense everything: The languid pop of mushrooms at our roots, The prickle of new […]
Slug
The White Wolf
The snowy ground shines with the white moon My silent paws are the only mark in the wilderness The pines tower over the sky further than I can reach In the distance my pack lie together But I am alone I howl to the moon Letting the anger out of me All the past I […]
the writer comes across a hedgehog at midnight or the hedgehog comes across a writer
little wolf in grandma’s bonnet and dress sways at an easy pace across pavement space, a two-step beat for four tiny feet – but then, under sudden lamplight, splits at a stroke, turning into two dancers, each looking to lead: the first is keen to effect a pause to worm for well-earned sustenance; the other, […]
Butterflies
Until that grand unravelling, along those puckering, pocketed contours, it is all layers of blood and spleen crusted up on one another in crystalline collusions of chaste diffidence, like the sore kinks around the hips and shoulders of a skeleton which has been forced to grow coiled up inside a cupboard. But when you dredge […]
A Woodpigeon
I tend to avoid large bodies of water But when dehydration decrees That I must visit one such brimming mirror, I am told again that I am ugly. My crooked beak laps and splashes, Distorting that once still surface with circles: Echoes of distaste – Widening, scornful eyes. So I try to make amends For […]