Breaking Light: part two
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ii
It is late. It is early.
Lady Autumn is walking
with sloe-eyed grace
through our lives once again;
rose-hipped, withy-limbed,
bejewelled with blackberries like
tiny bunches of grapes,
ready to burst on your tongue,
lips, fingertips,
stained with juice;
rowan berries, hard as nipples;
elder berries glisten like spider eyes,
from boughs of yellow flames,
watching.
The forest floor
where we made love
sanctified by
your blood, my seed,
mingling with the soil.
Its rich earth of
fertile death
scattered with ash keys, acorns,
fur-flowered beechmast,
horse chestnuts, hard and smooth
in their spiky jackets
(like antiques packed in a sea mine),
the milky bullets of cobs,
walnuts ransacked by Ratatosk
buried in forgotten cists,
fungi erupting from another world,
like fish gasping for breath,
gills gaping.
I graze lazily through your edible forest –
pore my hot breath into your jew’s ear,
rifle your King Alfred’s cakes
and penny buns,
devour your chicken-in-the-woods.
I trace the lace of your mycelia –
the wood’s lingerie. I yield
to your moreish morel,
drink champagne from your chanterelle.
You lick my slippery jack,
make my puff balls
explode.
Feral cry in the thicket,
the grunt of wild boar
snuffling out truffles,
the sow’s ear of his mate.
A roe deer freezes, wet nostrils twitch,
a flank shivers,
and it leaps into the wood’s legend.
The sunlight snags
on the canopy’s lattice,
the chlorophyll circuit-board
of a crimson leaf,
the abacus of dew
on a cobweb.
Nature’s astonishing
attention to detail
insisting
we notice
like an act of love.
I stroke your face
with a tuft of old man’s beard,
circumnavigate you with a feather,
all your inlets and promontories.
We cast a limpet shell
on the river
laden with our dreams
and laugh as it sinks.
Copyright ©Kevan Manwaring 2010
Continued tomorrow
First published in Soul of the Earth (Awen 2010) and soon to be featured in the forthcoming Silver Branch: bardic poems by Kevan Manwaring (Awen 2017).
https://www.awenpublications.co.uk/
