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Erin Clark

Newsfeed, Saturday

Ah, god. Not another bloody poem

about the weather. We’d rather

ogle celebrities’ and royals’ woes

and all the climaxes and crises

that are everyone’s fault                       but ours.

 

Please cease penning odes to cold dawns

and warm known deft fingers at work

in the dark while the sun yearns over

fallow, frosty acreage. Display

your public despair – forget your private happiness.

30 April

Cold, delayed Spring this year.             The seedlings ordered: ‘An

Allotment In A Box!’                              are late in arriving,

too. The mother farm,                         picture it, full

 

of underpaid drones                             coaxing shoots, with help

from clear greenhouse panes,               eking what they can

from the largely unseen                        sun. Apologetic

 

emails: your plants are coming             soon and very soon.

Prepare the ground, the beds!              I labor, knowing neither

the day nor the hour,                           turning over the soil,

 

yanking up keen weeds,

                                    repairing the constant

                                                            fox-damage. Keeping awake.

former mentor

You were the one who taught me to                grieve

twice. Yes, grieve                     for the departed themselves.    Say

my dutiful requiems                 in season and out of season.    But

first, and last,                           grieve for what

they were to me:

     so much larger than their years of life

     so much stranger, and less biddable.

Erin Clark is a queer American writer and priest living in London. Her work has appeared in the New Critique, the Oxonian Review, Geez, The Hour, The Primer, Free Verse Revolution, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook Whom Sea Left Behind: A Leviathaniary is forthcoming in 2023 (Alien Buddha Press). She is the author of the nonfiction Sacred Pavement (2021). 

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