cut out at the root.

Mute oceans. Oil like a gag

on the Gulf of Mexico.

A woodpecker heckled.

A vulture picked at its own breast.

Thrice from the cockerel, as ever.

The macaw squawked:

Nouns I know –

Rain. Forest. Fire. Ash.

Chainsaw. Cattle. Cocaine. Cash.

Squatters. Ranchers. Loggers. Looters.

Barons. Shooters.

A hawk swore.

A nightingale opened its throat

in a garbled quote.

A worm turned in the blackbird’s beak.

This from the crane:

What I saw – slow thaw

in permafrost; broken terrain

of mud and lakes;

peat broth; seepage; melt;

methane breath.

A bat hung like a suicide.

Only a rasp of wings from the raven.

A heron was stone; a robin blood

in the written wood.

So snow and darkness slowly fell;

the eagle, history, in silhouette,

with the golden plover,

and the albatross

telling of Arctic ice

as the cold, hard moon calved from the earth.

Telling the Bees

When I went to read

the bulletin about broken holy beads

to the bees,

the beads were the bees themselves …

(though once I’d been

a bairn with a bamboo-cane,

keen to follow the beekeeper

down to the hives, tap and tell

all news – whose bride, who lied, who’d died –

and had seen the bees as a rosary, girdling,

garden by garden, the land;

or had heard their hard devotional sound

in the ears of flowers

as I barely breathed, beheld

their bold, intimate touch…)

for a scattered bracelet of bees

lay on the grass by their burgled hive.

So how could I tell the bees?

Black blood in the sea.

Corn buttercup brought to its knee.

No honey for tea.

Dorothy Wordsworth is Dead

who came to lose every tooth in her head;

fierce maid, who saw the crowfoot

as a spinster friend; found, in the russet fronds

of Osmunda ferns, fervour;

feared cows;

on all fours crawled

home through a thunderstorm;

walked five miles each way, each day,

in hope of letters; thin scrap, work-worn,

her black frock mud-hemmed;

Dorothy,

green gold of moss in her loose purse, gatherer,

who thought strawberry blossom brave

in its early grave of rock; had quick birds

for her own eyes from watching them:

the robin’s blushing bounce,

the magpie’s funeral chic,

the heron’s grief,

grief …

whose tongue travelled her empty gums

on her long lake treks;

but was loved yet,

sharp lass, noticer; all ears, years,

for the wind’s thumb on the latch;

first to spy – o sister –

the moon’s eye at the glass,

two stars squinting …

and cold in her bed

uttered flowers, hepatica, daffodil, anemone,

crocus,

as a corpse in its manner does

in St Oswald’s churchyard under the yews

her brother planted;

and trudged or lay by him till he kindled.

Cockermouth and Workington

No folk fled the flood,

no flags furled or spirits failed –

one brave soul felled.

Fouled fortune followed,

but families filed into the fold

for a fire flared.

They were floored,

a few said fooled; no – fuelled