Quaking Aspen (Populus tremula)
By Sue Reed
I can’t bear to watch. The others don’t seem to suffer so much: the oak gets a haircut, the beech a trim, the one from Australia whose name I don’t know has several feet lopped off the top. But the aspen is felled. They say it has grown too big for the garden and has split at the base of the trunk. I remain indoors.
There is a clump of aspen at your woodland grave. We walk along the path from the cars, silent through dew-soaked grass. I hear the fluttering of leaves as we approach the open ground. It is like water trickling in a mountain stream. I look up at the moving leaves, and their blunt teeth tremble as your willow casket creaks and is lowered in the ground. Stems that seem too frail, jostle in the breeze. The branches sway in sympathy. The wind gets up and the sound of quaking aspen rise as you are laid to rest. Generous applause is carried in the wind. There is no Celtic crown to ease your return, but you spoke to me through that garden tree, the one they are chopping down. The shimmer and shush of trembling leaves gave a signal to pause whatever I was doing and have a natter with you.
They leave a gap where your tree has been, like a missing tooth, a hole that needs filling. It takes a while, and without any help from us a new sapling grows, lanky just like you, fighting for the light. As I hang out the washing, I hear that familiar flutter, see the wink of silver and green and you tap me on the shoulder.
Self-Care for Herons
By Ruth Yates
The heron does not ask himself
if he practises self-care,
but doubtlessly, he does.
He looks after each of his thousand
feathers, takes stock of the acres
around his nest, inspects the quality
of fish in the water and in his beak.
He looks to the moon every morning
and every evening, and shares shy glances
with the robins and the sparrows.
He monitors the seagulls’ noise
and stalks through the water’s circles,
each ripple once belonged, now a memory.
Wellbeing / Water / The Lakes
By Jane Burn
oh how we love water . a river’s rambling flow . a lake’s glass
fry quick as sparks . pure river passing through their gills
metals / nitrates / phosphorous . water curdles with unnatural foam
millions come . for the endless wellbeing of water . Arctic char
in the cold . glacial . in the deep . did you know they bait Arctic char
with spoons . stir them from the depths . catch and release . speckled
pike . eels . trout . chub . bream . carp . rare vendace . the water holds
our boats . our bodies . anthropogenic eutrophication . sunken light
a pair of swans skiff by . toxic blue algae . lower our bodies
into the reflective sheet . wade through the echo of fell and sky
there are websites to tell you where . to park . how busy
the car parks are . where to meet . how to avoid boats
grazing strips the fells . soil erodes . sediment accumulates
sometimes it’s good to be flotsam . be rinsed afresh . be released
by water . it beckons . amniotic . the land is our mother . we go back
to the womb . try to change the content of our minds . be made alive
again . in touch . with nature . ourselves on jetties . contemplating
water . looking out . our burden belongs to water . we are weightless
and we go home again . wait for the feeling of silver to fade
and crave . crave . crave .
before he saw a UFO in a hilly car park, my Grandad was a sceptic too
By Molly Knox
It was the warm beam of a craggy rock at the turn of the crow road.
I thought I’d give it a chance to distract me from racing to the edge of my grandfather’s glen. my friend came from another planet in the rumble of night. a wiggle of distance. shot past a bothy and out of black holes from dimensions up-side left. right to the summit below the bend, where I was bleating for trust in this electric blaze of a wee home
it’s a flight path, sure, but no usually for intergalactic folk
In my head he is facing out, creasing his brow, eyeline obscured by blowing ginger curls. during that cosmic journey on the milk train, the starry bus to campsie glen, he wondered if they’d understand his glee. a generational meeting place
but for now, I’m not thinking about that
I feel it like a star, blister past my car window, a perplexed burst of heat hidden by my clatter of cassettes. ones left in the box in his linen cupboard without a door. he was a sceptic too, you know, but he said he knew what he saw, and I believed him well enough.
fling your boots in the Coffin Linn, like me.
This new stranger gleams with greenish greyish teeth. Bill wouldn’t approve of the way he wears his tie. hours of searching in the streams together, underneath vans in the car park. nothing
There was no sign at Crichton’s cairn, the South Braes. none else at the cottage where the girl lived to come to school.
Staring through my telescope on a deckchair by Whitefield pond and the burns at the back, slaking my thirst for wonder, sipping a glass of well water. Beside me, this funny thing that looks so alone, curiously chomping down shale, some unsettled boulders on the grass. I guess he is an unknown friend who
has been crash landing, down over the fells like a plane into the meikle bin, spinning and slowly, slowly eroding his village I wish I knew better.
Sue Reed writes from deep in rural Northumberland with a love for the natural world. She recently completed her MA at Newcastle University in Creative Writing and is working on her first novel, a tale for young adults and anyone else who wants to read it. It is called The Rewilding of Molly McFlynn, a YA novel about the pressure to create a false self in order to fit in.
Ruth Yates is a poet based in Sheffield. Her work has been published in magazines and anthologies including ‘Introduction X: The Poetry Business Book of New Poets’
Jane Burn is a Pushcart/Forward Prize nominated, award-winning, working class, bi, neurodivergent poet, artist, essayist and author of non-traditional scholarly papers (one to be published in 2022 by Persona Studies). Her poems are widely published. Jane is documenting her neurodivergent/hybrid writing practice, funded by Arts Council England. Her latest collection, Be Feared, is published by Nine Arches Press.
Molly Knox is a Music student at Durham University from Glasgow. Much of her work explore themes of identity through nature or folklore as a lens. Their poetry, reviews and writings have previously been published in online lit mags and student publications.