Tag: wildness

The beetle, named not for doe-like grace
but for those jaws jutting from its head
like battlements, like weapons poised
to maim. I have never seen a stag beetle
fighting, or rutting, embodying its name -
only watched their ponderous paths
through leaf litter, shining in plate armour
at the feet of sycamores. 
These stags are jewelled scarabs
to a ten year old. Ancient people made gods
from them. This one, still and hollow,
I too make immortal. Curved bronze, 
metallic umber shine in clouds of cotton. 
Jaws cradling daisy heads, 
entombed in my matchbox.

Photo by Alfred Kenneally on Unsplash

Go outside. Hang your body-steam ornaments in licked-steel air. Free your heat to mushroom loam as you drop your clothes.

Step onto velvet moss, black juice of ancient peat welling between your toes. Follow snail glitter paths and filmy cobblestones into dank smoked cold.

Your vastness is filling. Silence gives way to a staccato of crows. Clouds cataract, steal your hands. Kissed in soft cold you are Moses, parting the sea, Cleopatra, plunging in milk.

Billowing towers flow up and crash over. The sky parts to a diffuse, pearly spotlight as you turn with ballerina-grace in a silk-chill tornado. Every leaf turns to look. Den-curled creatures and writhing earthworms burrow up to see you disappear from view.

A transitory flash of amber bathes every silent stone. You're the air after a snap of the fingers, the imprint of words in the wind.

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash