Four Lavender Pots, November 2015
Our lavender are dead but there is
light on them. Browned, traumatised –
the four pots failed in September,
while we were away, for lack of water.
Their bee-summons purple is no more;
they attract no wing-flutter to their pores.
I am not inclined to think them dead.
Sun blasts the ledge, until their naked
neurons fire into life: it’s as if
their nods acknowledge my wife
for planting them once in summer’s earth.
They look relieved to be post-death
and still part, though changed, of creation.
And I think of the murdered in Paris again:
may a similar wraparound of light,
with the same perpetual mysteries in it,
cancel the disaster in everything,
brighten the travesty of their dying –
and help them up, and out of pain,
towards an equivalent benediction.
Christopher Jackson is deputy editor of business and culture magazine Spear’s. He is the author of six books including The Fragile Democracy (2016) on US politics, the best-selling Roger Federer (2017) a book about philosophy and sport, and Theresa May (2018). He was named one of five poets to watch by the Huffington Post in 2013, and longlisted for the National Poetry Prize in 2016; his volume The Gallery was published by the University of Salzburg to critical acclaim in 2013.