You want life to be smooth.
You want to shed the inevitability of human life
as if only then you will be able to live.
You haven’t yet learned enough to remember
How to savour the sound of wind in a canopy
or watch the leaves glittering in the sunlight
while your heart is breaking
or the pressure mounts inside you.
You think you want to smooth out the edges of life,
shave the cracked and jagged bark
to the smooth wood grain below
like Gipetto.
But the blade used against yourself
will never give you smoothness.
You grab knives when you really need spoons.
Sea glass is made smooth by surrendering
to the currents and tides tossing it around
as if the sea didn’t care what comes of it.
But the sea you’re swimming in does care
about you.
It’s roughness is not to hurt you. It just is.
May it smooth away your rough edges –
the sharpness that never really belonged to you –
and leave you whole
like the sea glass that finally makes
its way back to the shore.

Anger is an energy trying to save you.
It shouts down the quavering voice of fear
assuming incorrectly it is stronger
as the loudest tend to.
Fear, like her sister Silence,
descends heavily in the space between us
like a crystal cloche on a small flame,
yet it is also fragile enough to disappear
when you speak its name aloud.
Fear and Anger are but Grief’s calling card –
two sides, two dimensions.
But Grief is at the door, in the flesh,
waiting to be allowed in.

Like the blind man of Bethsaida
I see men walking as trees
with shy crowns, keeping their distances
to let the light in
or to not get hurt, or harm another
perhaps
whatever their reasons, the gaps between
them spread like a web of capillaries
across the sky.

Deep below the ground,
their roots reach for each other,
communicating, connecting, consolidating
their knowledge to save each other.
Mugomo trees have roots
so deep and widespread
they hold together the very land;
no wonder sacred spirits might dwell there.

Perhpas there is a reason there are trees
older than Jesus,
trees which can grow
larger than a blue whale.
What intelligence do we fail to recognise
precisely because it is so different to our own?

The petrichor from tears in a desert city
not allowed to be deserted
its people playing a waiting game
they can’t get out of.
Mute children waiting for the final bomb.
Does blood mixed with sand also have a scent?

Tertiary trauma seems a new phenomenon
of a digital age
where genocide shows up on my phone
between comedy highlights
and relationship advice.
I feel tired and useless and stare instead
at the dappled light filtered through my houseplants.

Privilege weighs far less
than a child’s unconscious body picked out of the rubble;
the two together don’t sit well.
I reach for the old medicine of productivity
but the disease, it seems, has become resistent.
The disease is the medicine now: sorrow.

Dis-ease. Admitting ease
was never our inheritance.
Before I can move, I must be moved,
crying tears into English soil,
watering my houseplants in ritual,
before I return to the world to love it
fiercely enough to fight for it.