|
Strange Fruits
The wasp who makes no honey
gave us ink.
In early spring
oak galls appear;
darkening in autumn,
they gestate:
emerging into English light,
this tiny emigrant
was smuggled in Aleppo oak -
an alien acorn.
Oxford Ragwort
From Etna’s cinder slopes
to the Botanic garden -
Senecio Squalidus
escaped;
it slipped out of a cultivated bed,
the ancient cemetery walls,
the city’s bounds,
following the gaps
in paving stones,
the new-laid tracks
of railway lines,
south-east
along the clinker beds,
into the heart of London -
bombcraters,
burnt-out scrubland,
scorched earth again.
|
