The pinhole pupil of a lensless eye
stares south, where our star
clambers through branches
increment by increment
etching its image onto a paper retina.
From winter’s depths each arc stretches
towards midsummer. Some days
are unbroken sweeps of brightness.
Others are punctuated
by the conversations of clouds.
The gaps, dark times,
are best forgotten. Look—
here is all the light of our journey
halfway round the sun.
Ardgartan
‘let me say a word on behalf of these little things that run the world.’
—Edward O. Wilson
Green light over the burn, the unseen road
verge. Whining, like a plague of mosquitos, some machine
interrupted at, whoa, intervals, wh, wh, by its own, whoh-ah,
moan as overgrowth and undergrowth is rendered
into slumped silence.
No rasp of insects.
The water slaps, laps, trickles a constant tickling
where it crests and breaks into dazzling
whorls, blabbing and babbling its wet mouth
spits and splits the sun’s glances
into gobbets and pearls.
No lisp of insects.
Gruff breath, exhaled and never drawn in—
traffic’s inexhaustible gust. Filtered through spruce,
chaffinch chatter, strings of descending
song, walkers’ good-natured banter
with a flourish of fucks.
No chafe of insects.
A breeze fleetingly twitches
an open page in a shaft of sun. The air’s every mote
illuminated—a few Brownian-motion-midges
per metre cube. The chicken salad, the fruit and us
untroubled. Troubled.
No buzz.
Gillian Dawson
Gillian Dawson is a book lover who works in a university library. She is a member of St Mungo’s Mirrorball, Glasgow’s network of poets. Her poems have been published in journals and anthologies including: Best Scottish Poems 2023 (Scottish Poetry Library), Green Verse (Saraband 2024), Gutter, Magma, and Poetry News.