Poetry

from The Territory of Rain, 2015

Blanket Bog

Blanket bog clothes the land
like a black melancholy, shrouding
the slopes in the weight of its slo-mo layers.
Grudges and peat break down slowly.
Bones of old loves and hates
are kept intact for ever.

Sphagnum can absorb
twice its own weight in tears.
Crazy insectivorous plants
thrive on trapped flies and imagined slights,
and lost birds wail, raking through pools
and stirring the endless mud.

Keep it safe, keep it undisturbed.
Under these tons of peat and apathy
enough carbon is sequestered
to melt the last chips of polar ice
and burn up every one of us
on the whole raging earth.
From The Territory of Rain

from Haggards 2018

Who Knows

For Ginny Battson

There are people who know the world
in specifics – not gull, but black-backed,
(lesser and greater), black-headed,
common, glaucous and herring.

There are people who know the woods –
not trees, but oak, willow, hazel,
aspen, and lime, and not oak
but sessile or pedunculate.

There are people who learn the names,
the Latin, the genus, the cultivar,
making lists for countries and years,
and the life-list with the bbjs,
the ticks, and the gaps they need to fill.

And then, there are other people
whose hands and eyes know everything,
who taste the wind for salt or coming rain,
who find the right leaf, or root, or berry
for health or flavour, without a word spoken.

There are people who know their gardens
like their family, their lawn like their own skin,
a new bird by the frisson the cat makes,
even before the stranger's call
breaks into the grey still morning.

And who can tell us which of these
knows best, knows more, can teach,
protect or harvest earth and sky
and water for the common good?

Or shall we try for both, a lore
of senses, heart and mind at one,
where knowledge and compassion
are held in equal balance, equal trust?

from The Well of the Moon, 2021

Praise-Poem for Weeds

I call on the gallus herbs,
the wild herbs of verge and scrub,
the loud and flashy herbs,
the herbs with the souls of weeds,
the unrelenting invaders who blow
their seeds over the hills,
send their roots rampaging
through the ditches, between
my lettuce and cabbage and kale.
I’ll butter their feral paws,
tame them in my pestle, they’ll guard me
from elf-shot, the stitch, the sudden
pain that sneaks between the light
woven shield of my ribs.
Feverfew, plantain, red dead nettle!
Come, smother it all, you little witches,
you ghosts of old gardeners,
you tough, bristly, bitter
invincible champions.

Recent Poems

first published in The Earth Is Our Home, ed. Gerry Loose 2023

Household Gods

For the refugees in the Park Hill Hotel
In my Girl Guide shirt pocket, the required
handkerchief, pencil and paper, a sixpence
for the phone, a knife, a box of matches.
I wandered city streets as well equipped
as Otzi in the ice, in his well-stitched cloak
of skins, his grass-lined snowshoes. Whatever
you carry, you take the means of making fire,
you take the tools for being at home.

The fireplace is where you keep the precious things,
the baby’s shoe, your daughter’s maiden curls,
the photos that mean most. It’s where you share
the warmth, food, stories, shelter - a flame’s the gift
you can share without loss. A hotel is not a home.
A bed is not enough. You need a hearth.

first published in London Grip 2024

The Good Neighbours

We know they’re here, unseen mostly, a law
unto themselves. They keep strange hours.
Their food is not for us. They do no harm,
not really, with their music, beauty, mischief,
horror – scattered leavings of feasts and feuds -
bones, feathers, empty shells in the grass.
Those who see them do not tell, those
who tell do not thrive afterwards. Much
depends on pleasing them, leaving gifts
of milk and apples, seeds and mealworms.
We love to see them, but we do not get
too close. We wish they were elsewhere.

Artemisia

Mugwort, remember • what you proclaimed,
what you laid down • in the Lord's Decree.
First, you are called, • oldest of herbs.
You have the power • over three, over thirty.
You have power over venom, • over airborne infection.
You have power over the evil one • who wanders the world.
Lacnunga

I found you in the rubble on the wasteland
when first I looked beyond our own limits.
You were the first, new herb in the new ground.
Moon herb, guardian of the edgelands,
you were a spear against the schoolyard fence,
a tangle in the margins of the carpark.
You strengthen a woman’s core, your silver pelt
gleaming in moonlight along the quiet lanes.
Dissolver of boundaries, bringer of dreams,
you bring rest to the vigilant, insight to minds
troubled with rules and prejudice, flying
venom on social media. You brought me
resilience, the wiry scrappy strength of weeds,
the fresh astringency of no. Of this is me.

first published in Mugwort Magazine, 2025

(Please note on smaller devices line breaks may appear in incorrect places)