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).