Paperboats Zine

They’d found it on the ground, wing broken,
and rejuvenated it with water, mixed seeds and
Instagram Live.

The wind’s got rain
in its mouth, lets
the rain do the talking:

The Japanese anemones don’t know what to do.
They swither and sway, all dusty-pink confusion.
They’ve never met wind like this before,

The headlines had canvassed the coming storm as ‘once in a generation’ – I doubted that.

Someone will have to stand, to raise their voices.
Unlikely to be the people five miles high
underlining death sentences in vapour trails.

Ankle-deep in still water, bark plump
and yielding to that dark mirror of
liquid – there is some shape here
I recognise.

A robin is singing from the lilac tree. The wistful, doodling song is achingly familiar, yet I realise I haven’t heard it for a while.

Our torches scan the road
lighthouse beams on a dark sea
there on the verge the gleam of amber eyes

I wander around the garden, deciding to go barefoot on the sodden grass and notice jewels on the washing line

I was thunder once
a grinding jaw of ice and time,
carving valleys into shape,
scrawling rivers into stone.

Frozen under this glass dome
I am their most-visited exhibit:
they file past dressed in solar shields

Before any of this had ever happened,
before The Vanishing and, now, after it
has gone, if anyone had actually asked

The agroforestry talk had included poems about belonging, photos of Mangalitza pigs in woodland pasture. Now, on our way home, a saffron half-moon

How can you speak of bleak
when there is all this glisten?

Listen to my peep of lowgrow –

Wipe with cotton balls of clouds
the gaping wounds of the ozone layer
and suture them with the rainbow’s
multicoloured thread.

So, I’m a lichen. Not an ordinary
grey-green lichen fattening on a tree
but a brilliant yellow lichen
on the headboard of our bed