Plainsong
We'll off our shoes and walk barefoot
where once pigs put out to pannage, and
black-faced sheep grew fleece for Flanders' looms.
The night air thrums with insects where then
voices hummed, plainsong from men
who otherwise grew in a glade of silence.
Despite its ruination, this is a place of love.
Listen, and you can hear the lay brothers
tilting in jests in the old undercroft;
behind the cat-claw rankness of Herb Robert,
scent a thread of frankincense; sense
the owlish hush of white cowls at dusk.
Those sparks you thought were glow worms
are dead monks' candles lit in alcoves above
their stony cots. Come, let us lie down and burn
in their dormitory under the stars scattered like ash.
Nobody's coming, not in five hundred years.
Here we may kiss, test the weight of our bodies
on each other's scales. Let nature overtake
what once was holy; for our sanctuary
is in our bodies, in the vaults of our embrace,
the confessionals of lovers' ears, the stoops
of our mouths, the prayers of our eyes, the psalters
of our skins, the altars of our secret parts.
*****
Becoming a Wild Goose
When you are drawn to churchyard shadows more than most
and glimpse above a wishing bone of geese winging north
with cackling song of gale-blown rigging, let your wanting
soar upon a thermal wind in line, becoming something
greater; then crawl into the hedge, the mother bowl
of her nest, curl knees to chest, head to knees – small –
to sleep, to dream, embalmed in smells of down and moss
since smelling is almost being; and dreaming, let frost
crisp its brittle caul around your skin, slumbering there
in aqueous quiet till dawn when the cowl wherein you curl
to sleep – is breached and grins its smile at waking skies.
Now! Now you sense magnetically how and where to fly.
Zoë Green is a Scottish poet who lives in the Thuringian countryside. She has won a Candlestick Press award, been shortlisted for the 2022 London Magazine Poetry Prize and been longlisted for the 2023 Spelt Poetry Prize. She received "Highly Commended" in the Scots poetry category of the 2023 McLellan Poetry Competition. When she’s not writing poetry, she’s teaching literature, boxing, walking her Brittany spaniel or doing yoga. She can stand on her head for several minutes at a time.
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