Today’s choice

Previous poems

Trelawney

 

 

 

What is holding you back from building your wormery?

You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.
And no lack of wood – an affluence of pallet offcuts. Here –
the frames are half-made! Is it the fear of getting it wrong?
Of irreversible mistakes now drilled in. The commitment
to a design that might not ultimately lead to compost.
Is it the threat of foxes – always the foxes – that you might
aid their survival? Or the lack of a lid to keep it all in?

Is it the prospect of no longer having a wormery to build?
Of being someone who is no longer building a wormery.
Someone done with DIY. Done with improvements. With no purpose left.

Of being someone who even builds a wormery.
But you will keep it, as an unfinished testimony. A celebration
of indecision. And one day decomposed small print might
mingle with castoffs, for the worms to make sense of it all.

 

 

Trelawney has featured in the Bridport and Winchester Poetry Prizes and Munster Literature Centre’s International Chapbook Competition; and has work published in the Broken Sleep anthologies of modern Cornish poets and on masculinity, Magma, Southword, and elsewhere. Iinsta.BenTrelawney

Clive Donovan

If I were a ghost
I think I would shrink
and perch on wooden poles
and deco shades – get a good view
of what I am supposed to be haunting

Seán Street

There was a time when I took my radio
into the night wood and tuned its pyracantha
needle along the dial through noise jungles
to silent darkness at the waveband’s end.

Jean O’Brien

Winter soil is hard and hoar crusted,
birds peck with blunted beaks,
pushing up are the blind green pods
of what will soon be yellow daffodils,
given light and air.

Jean Atkin

We scoured the parish tip most weeks, when we were kids.
We clambered it in wellies.  Ferals, we scavenged
in the debris of the adults’ lives.