Poetry prize fee paid. Ten pounds.

Ten pounds twisting to London

hard dollars transmute to light

over salt and weed and rusty plunging trawler

through cold frosted half cones of grass

sharp as the morning itself and….

(there is no way to say it well)

over a badger. A badger? that foreign thing;

sourced from a soft-spined and creased children’s penny storybook.

Known not where the treetops burn in joy.

It might see slow, through furrowed brow,

ten pounds flash past across a sky.

Sent like a streak of liquid silver

spun long by that far glassblower in striped pantaloons

but blown too hard, too far, too late, to cut, or break, the blue above.

blown too hard, too far ,too late

Or sent through clacking keyboard keys

that link and throw gathered bundled light

hand spun strands of thin light

flashing silent across the earth?

But

badgers are the stuff of childhood, just as are dreams.

And here and now?

We smoke and burn,

we chafe and cry, we chafe and cry

and as for poets?

They all lie deep; they all lie deep.

As we, walk muted by.