Hello

      The pink and the brown   So many times I walked head down   half asleep along that ordinary road to school until the day I saw the cherry trees sick of standing around bored and invisible all at once dressed up sinewy brown limbs embellished with...

    Aberfan The hillside had continued to spill onto the hand-digging first responders. Cliff Michelmore, in stark black and white, his words threading, stitching, beside himself with grief. My mother never cried so much. She’d had the two of us, had learnt...

    We are no longer what blood is to the body  After Tiken Jah Fakoly I They are sharing the world. This same small village of ours, where our fathers erected their huts, & buried their aged. They are destroying the sky we built with our unequal...

    How to write a poem about a mountain On the ridge we stop to catch ourselves, leaning against crags to view the drop. You tell me how you envy my sweeping vistas, my heritage of paths that cut clean through wind. I shush your maundering and press on...

    New York City at night Here, in my Manhattan room / insomnia tugs at me like a half-closed taxi door / letting all the echoes in / an ambulance carries the last breath of an asthmatic man / a few blocks away, a party spills over the rim of a rooftop /...

    A Philosophy of Light Formed into darkness an octopus squeezes around the spaces of a shipwreck. Light from the bloodmoon reddens the water and the octopus adapts and bleeds. The Earth hadn’t planned to block the sun. The moon can’t help how it affects...

    Dance With My Father after Luther I never danced with my father more so beside him, sometimes across in the clock face of summer dance circles. My father walks backwards better than most walk forward— so whenever he sewed his steps into the living room...

    Jigsaw A family photo, blown up and chopped into a thousand pieces then tipped on the table. We found our eyes first, as they swirled through fragments of black jumper, dark pine trees and an orange sunset sky. The jigsaw became a winter tradition, and...

      Lent As if it wasn’t enough cycling three miles to eight o’clock mass on cold white mornings I stayed in the chapel after the final blessing too early for class in the Colaiste I filled in time around the shadowy stations of the cross the...

      Charm Enough of scorch, scald, sore- and rawness. Sometimes flesh longs for eclipse. Mesh over mesh, compact me with cool plaster. Swaddling clothes.  Dry crust.  Sarcophagus. A scratch, a bramble rip... a mere sly snick from a page of your book...

      some fall (inspired by a Radio 4 Tweet of the Day) she told me about the still hours spent at the coast watching the east until finally a spume of feather   blood and effort   rises and approaches blackbirds and fieldfares   a gaunt line starving...

      After the forest fire Because we were four and I only had strength to carry one and knew no other way I carried the one who called out loudest; threatened us most. You two were left to walk behind in the dust of hot, dry summer and the heavy mud...