The Conker Trees
Wanging the stick up into the conker trees,
it seemed like the best ones hung just out of range,
bulging, like wrecking balls, unconquerable,
unshifted by wind, their stems unsnipped by sun.
Or if they fell, we must have still been in school,
or in at tea, having to help with something,
so it was just as if the stick had once more
pattered down amongst twigs and big flappy leaves.
It’s not like we didn’t have enough to thumb
open, to treasure like pebbles smoothed by sea;
it’s just they were better, they held a plenty,
the kind of heft I find myself reaching for
still in the mind’s higher canopy, as if
the pencil won’t fall flat, the page turn like a leaf.
Iain Twiddy studied literature at university, and lived for several years in northern Japan. His poems have been published in The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The London Magazine, The Moth and elsewhere.