A small selection of some recent poems …

Whiteway

Whiteway

“The future enters into us … in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.” Rilke

The land is dreaming again,

white as a thin shelled egg,

cloud shoulder, quickthorn, stone axe.

Ancient woman with cargo of salt.

Not bleached or alabaster, not

ivory or ashen, pearly, pure or ice.

But white as mycelium strands

digging at limestone

to make a road on the ridge.

The land says listen and merge,

like ammonite held in oolite.

How rock wants a wet body to make fossil.

Such are the things we’ve forgotten,

adrift from the otherworld

of mole, cave, worm.

Whiteway’s memories of kin’d —

a sinuous line that pulls us back, dwells

in our unions and uncertainties.

To be with the season,

dream the road, says the land.

Walk us back to ourselves.

This poem first appeared in Modron Magazine (July 2024). It was a winner of the Poetry Archive Now Worldview 2024 competition.

Let’s Not Kid Ourselves

Let’s not kid ourselves

Sometimes making the soup

is enough for comfort

when the sky is buttermilk

and pigeon and the twigs

are burned matchsticks

backlit by the sun.

But grey squirrels have no

predators in this

uncertain weather.

They ring the bark

for sweetness,

ransack the woodland.

There is a seed on the wing

on a hillside, where it begins

or ends, continues. Life,

again. And I want

to say, turn back, turn back!

We were all good people.

This poem first appeared in berlin lit (Spring 2024)

Lifecycle of the Cochineal Beetle, c.1788

‘Lifecycle of the Cochineal Beetle, c.1788’

‘it is worthwhile recalling that from the medieval era, one of the colours most prized by the crown, church and nobility in Europe for their finest fabrics was that of carmine or deep crimson.’ – Carlos Marichal Salinas

An egg breaks on the pad of a prickly pear somewhere
in Oaxaca where the scale insects’ livid bodies

mass and crackle in the sun. Emerging, a crawler nymph
clusters with the softness of her siblings

to feed in the downy blanket − explorers edging
to the brink of the known world.

Nymph throws out a long wisp of wax,
a thread to catch a ride on the wind, lifting and

landing on the terra incognita of a new cactus pad.
Her claim is staked with a stab of her beak.

Cochineal sups the juices, sees off predators
– lacewings, ladybirds, ants – with the bright surprise

of her body. Fat, fierce and full of poison. She
has detached her wings. Has no need of legs.

Holding her colour quietly in trust − she waits
for the male to eat his fill, to mate and die.

Scraped away at ninety days, her body is laid out
to dry then pulverised. Destined for dominion.

This poem first appeared in The Poetry Review (2023) and won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize.