Spring
The season for poets to look forward,
grateful for wind fresh snowdrops,
for ochre lifts of daffodils.
Then Spring came in
hospital.
Nurses clad in white,
PPE like armour
tending super spreader
patient zero.
Hardly matters
who
(was it in Lombardy?)
Barely matters,
of course.
Hope is a garden
blown by storms
where wells wish
for needles.
This year’s bloody snowdrops
wheeze knowledge.
We are all patient zero.
Saffron daffodils tremble
the breeze and wait
to see if the season
will turn on age,
or on pre-existing,
or if summer will even come.
Never Never Land
Stolen gems stashed in bamboo
cut by the pampas grass,
walled by centuries of granite
that comforts us.
Home in fern-lined lanes
through bolts of blue
that lead to waves over umber
seaweed forests. And Tinkerbell
at home in the wisteria,
her parlour glowing green
while the pancake sun glistened
in the jam we shared
with gluttonous wasps.
à table, four-deep in cutlery.
Salad, plat, cheese and desert.
Meals prepared every single day.
The flagstone kitchen floor
smooth under the tread of us,
shining under the glimpse of us.
These days, a doctor lives
in the portal to my Never Never Land.
I want to ring the bell and ask
if he believes in faeries.
Emma Woodford
Bindweed Magazine 