Too Much Sky
We trudge through air like setting cement,
each boot-print a muddy hallmark
to the silk screen of leaves at our feet.
The river drives out straight
from these few trees, channelling across
a landscape unwilling to rise above itself.
I must unlearn the fells, the drag of cloud
over moorland, the swollen fever of a river in spate.
Flattened under a fish-eyed sky, our words
are stretched thin as tin plate; a steel upright
of heron is all the perpendicular we have
until that too is gone, tilting on pterodactyl wings.
Jessica Penrose is learning to love the big skies of Cambridgeshire having moved south from the wilds of Yorkshire. Her publications include poems in The Rialto, Staple, Orbis and Mslexia, and she is working towards her first pamphlet.