Featured Poem

Into every account mail is pinging: ‘we will secure
our long-term future by competing on more fronts.’
Let’s find a glade where a thought might grow.
On Penistone Road, fans have assembled a totem pole shrine
out of teddy bears, Wednesday shirts, and ever-wilting
bouquets. They are taped to a long-redundant road sign,
as if to reconstruct a universal grammar. Dear
Performance Review, this is what I’d really aspire to.
From Beeley Wood Road, someone has flung a single
ballet shoe over the river. It curls, like a comma
for the mind. A captain of industry exhales
his strawberry vape and I imagine him dreaming
of a fixable world without his own depression.
The adjacent factory remains a nut-free zone.
Let’s fast-forward half a mile, as I climb the hard yards
towards Birley Edge. One acre of slope is bitumen black
and seeded with beer cans. An emerald fly dances Morse
on the hot-pan of a broken slate, but heather
knits in from all sides, its purples blossoming bees.
Elsewhere, narcissists and lamplighters are blagging
their way into the goonlight, but here, just under
the Birley Stone, someone has evoked their late mother
in flowers of violet and mildest blue. I’d love to stop,
but have business in the leafways of Wharncliffe Woods.
I find a tree, violently uprooted in some long blown-out
gale. The crater where it once clutched earth is a pool
fermenting mud-water wine. Reflected light minnows
back and forth, close-reading each crevice in the exposed
roots. Elsewhere, there are directives to create
future-facing partnerships, but I want only to collaborate
with pipits that flirt in and out of bracken tips, all day.
Here I sit reading T’ao Ch’ien to the trees, knowing little more
of strategy than this. Fresh crops of data are being harvested,
and bright careerists kneel to the metrics, but here,
aphids have printed their green bodies between the lines
of ‘Home Again Chant’. A golden Labrador lags far
behind its master, and snuffle-blesses my open book.