POKELOGAN

Here she will come to rest, mother of weeds,
stanching into algaed waters,
grey waters, red and green
and brown. She will come to a slow.
A stir of mayflies on her surface. Among her reeds,
a slicked brown mammal slips under her skirts
and is mud. She comes slow grown down,
roots down into silt and stillness.

Among the cricket song a yellowed eye that blinks,
scales, a tail that fans the shallows.
The flit of dead leaves falling like drift rain.
She has come and will not come again.

ASH

The nursery was plagued
with white and black flecks
on the tender skins.
They had not hardened to bark.
The fingers had shed their leaves
and the limbs had shrunk.
Stumped to obscure shapes.

They tried burning the bodies,
but the disease spread flies
through the forest
of sparks and smoke.
Everywhere foxes and rabbits
squealed from the spiral.
The charred witness of the trees.

IN CLAY WOOD

24/11/2012

Masonry tumbles like trees

at the halt of the treeline

that darkens the crumbling

stone into leaf mould.

Ivy choked stumps reach up

from the thorned net

of brambling snares that catch

rabbits and leverets and walkers.

The city is nowhere to here,

it's another turn and stile

that goes deep into sludge piles,

another puddle to drown in.

PLAGUES

It was the machines that went rust
and collapsed into lakes and ran red
among the boat oil and chemical spill.

Sumped in the marshlands, the mayflies
were swarming with sex and the frogs
multiplied like oleaginous oligarchs.

They struck up the dust with the drill,
but it was their fingers that itched
at the bites in the sand grained heat.

Whether it was oxen or mosquitoes
or tsetse or goats or wasps,
we flinched some at hooves and wings.

It came from the lab and killed horses,
dogs, livestock and pigs.
The pyres released virals into the crops.

What we have burned. What is ash.
It is fallout. A snowfall of radium
that dusts our skin with boils and rash.

Strange weather that coats
the Statue of Liberty in ice and snow.
Hurricanes belching from cooling towers.

Stripped cornfields. Grasslands stripped.
The factories stripped of their guts.
The workers stripped. Stripped bodies gassed.

They shone so many lights there were shadows
in every direction. So much light
it was impossible to see through. Dark truth.

If you painted lamb's blood on your door,
a lamb died in vain. Man made the future
and it swept them aside like a scourge.

Listen to the poem here: http://soundcloud.com/gavin-hudson-1/plagues

SHRIVEL

for SJ

When he reached sixty his penis
shrunk up his prostate
like a snail hiding its face
in its shell. His hermit crab
sometimes showed its claws
unexpectedly in the bath or on a bus,
but if he fancied a bash
it turned tortoise, a slug
in his fist that slipped his hand.

AUTUMN

for CR

I heard it from trees, burn leaves

gold through bronze into ash.

Whatever was gifted was burnt,

the flames silvering birches

with white heat, blackened elms,

a willow unwept in a cowl

of firecrackers. Come dawn, charred

limbs reach through the gunsmoke.

A fox bark coughs among embers.

IN CLAY WOOD

28/5/2012

I knew something was wrong

when the softness underfoot

resisted my tread. Something 

stiffer than fox mess

with brittle parts turned out

to be the carcass of a bird

that was dead some time.

The moment that you realise

you are not alone in the undergrowth,

that a pair of eyes is watching you

hop about on one foot,
scraping the offal from your sole
on bark, makes you cry.

Then the surprise,

the flowers around you take flight.

They were butterflies.

BAD POTATO WEATHER

The nightjars are blacking the sun out
with rainclouds of feather. Poor scratching
in the waterlogged soil for lungworm
and beetle. The potassium's peaking
round mid-afternoon, making sailors afraid
of lithium in spinach barrels. Flood warning
by dawn. This is bad potato weather. The kind
to sink dormice and make millionaires 
of stoats. In ferns, toads burp at frogs spawning
in rivers that burst, coursing new valleys
of acid erosion. Stone turns to leek in the riptides.

AT FOXTON DAM

It was June when we came to the fishing lake.

The midges were hazing the water for sex.

Fisherman sat at their poles in silence, deaf

to the blasts from the open-cast. It would change.

I showed him the plaque with the plans

for the nature reserve, said the hole

would be filled with marshland and heron.

No human would set foot beyond the barbed 

wire fence and patrolling guard. He said

he would like to see that, but I said, 'no,

it's off limits.' Instead, we scrambled

up the bank to the pit edge and looked down

at the diggers and trucks fetching slag.