Poems: 'Formica Exsecta'/'Halcyon Days'/ Published in Dark Mountain - Eight Fires. Autumn 2023
Formica Exsecta
I am Winter’s Ant, curled inside resinous lengths of halfDark-halfLight, quiet beneath press of snow. I am mighty articulations of queendom, horizons of presence. I am at rest. I bear the scars of intervention: have been dug and turned over; have been caught, barrowed, exiled. Like all of my kind I have focus. I aim. I. Am. I am queen of between; I reign over the light that gets through the cracks. I am free-choice and dawn-struck wings. I rest now so that I can strive and reach and aim. Again and again. So that my wings – those fierce opacities – may raise me to my mate, my mates, in thick summer air. I am passion. I am pine-besotted, needling, flickering. I am survival aroused. I am the crackle of polyamory. I am sun-spilt and sun-shared amongst wee-est, feistiest limbs. I tremble to the tune of eternity. I outlive, outwit, outshine. I radiate wings and sunlove. I shape eggs. I am queen, ruler of new colonies, integrator of genius and verve. I am Winter’s antidote to shadow.
Halcyon Days
Here, where your feet stop, you smell deer,
their lain-on beds circle warmth
in the red winter behind your eyes.
On a simple skyline two hinds chase a fence,
dusk draws light into sodden bracken
until it burns.
*
Another hill, another day, silence hisses
slim sounds you can’t untangle.
A stag, four calves, seven hinds graze
chest-height on bog-myrtle shoots
The backward of the rifle’s safety catch –
tiny tick of metal-on-metal – drills into peace,
stills long jaws, lifts heads, drives bodies-minds-ears
wide away beyond bullet
faces look back taking everything in –
you are there, small as the metal tongue-click
you breathed into the silence
like ash from a fire.
*
On another day in a narrow glen
your fingers trace deer carved in stone.
Soon the wind will be back,
lifting fears like woodcock from ditches,
ripping grass, blowing deer-coats to a blaze.