Day One

Bird Feeder by Dave Green

Nature doesn’t need a theme

I took a detour through the downs
To seek the inspiration
The spring greens
Shafts of blue
Floating fields in the wind

Vertical vines disrupt the downs
Bowing to their Mecca
With dreams of the new champagne

Bended boughs push the limits of their strength
Debris drenched in the road
The truck rattled on its haunches

The inspiration filled my eyes
As the words blew around my brain
I spot a place to stop
Scribe them down
Before they float away

Nature doesn’t need a theme
Or an overarching narrative
It doesn’t have an end
It just is

-Simon Zec

My Many Random Acts Of Wildness:

1. Lawn Cutting

Wife likes our lawn to be cut in straight lines.
A mute boy next door in fascination
Keenly watches the geometric times
I reach the edge, marks the delineation.

He has a toy lawnmower of his own.
Sometimes his mam kindly allows him grip
her hands on their mower, grass mown
by both, her feet follow his as they strip

the wildness out of their lawn. His toy won’t
cut grass but safely glides over its length,
so he stamps and bawls when his world don’t
conform to his straight lines, because it’s bent.

My wife says “Better” to our short shorn lawn.
We all want the wild to be uniform.

-Paul Brookes

Bios and Links

-Dave Green

lives and works in Sheffield.  For 30 years he worked in education with vulnerable and neurodiverse children before belatedly discovering that recent governments may not be prioritizing the marginalized in society.  Now he trains people in positive mental health and how to recover from the pandemic.  He writes poems, paints, chops logs, cycles everywhere and shops local.

-Simon Zec