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Driving past a sign that offers sea shimmer plants for sale,
we do not stop to ask, but wonder if these plants always remember
the language of ocean. Through granite, sandstone, basalt,
volcanic hardened lava flows, emotional geology,
we learn that roads must bend and curve through shale and landslip,
that we exist between rock and rock.
We pull off road to glittering sea. Ripples
remind us of a more fluid way of being — quicksilver light and water.
Gannets dive and plunge, sparks of sun falling from the sky.
My children grow in flowerpots with crocks of Gaudi mosaic,
volcanic glass. They thrive on leaves from English autumns
dug around their stems. Bamboo stakes teach them ritual,
the way to compromise, guide tendrils along the wall.
They absorb acid rain, Sahara drought and warfare,
surging radio waves. The text of frontline reports,
explosions, spatter unfurling leaves. They twist towards the light,
sap still rising, crack the boundaries of their terracotta homes,
release scent of green and cordite from strange blossoms.
A whisper of Old Norse on my lips, I can feel the island language floating inside me —
pieces of driftwood in my blood.
With my back to the sea, the colours of blackened mountains,
the purples, the yellows and every shade of sky
absorb me.
There’s a glacier, almost mint green in the clarity of this light.
I want to lick it.
It will seal my tongue to a language from which I can create only a small fire,
barely enough to warm myself when the snow comes.
January is at its best —
damp and greyness stroke my bones.
I climb through barbed wire by the Darent surging foam, frothing full mud
and we walk along the tufts and earth of the bank, along its ancient track.
On my hand, close to my body, a darkness of feathers —
talons own my thumb.
For a moment there is only the hawk, the grey light, me.
A twig snaps underfoot and he is away, cast into the air.
This is the wolf of the sky circling, restless.
He swoops and settles on the limb of a beech.
I am walking on, looking over my shoulder,
trying to pick his form from the twist and clump of branches —
I am never out of his sight.
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