Red Squirrel Press Presents…

Mandy Haggith

Zi Gong

For thirty years the palace has lain empty

awaiting occupation by the empress.

Its corniced corridors are voids, its rooms

have never chimed with a child’s play.

No little royal feet have ever stamped here.

Each month the crippled servants

gather with buckets of tears to bleach and scrub.

We drag all the tattered furniture outside

and we wheedle open the sky lights

to let the moon and stars bleed in

hoping the night will bathe everything clean

ready for the coming of the unborn queen.

Originally from Northumberland, Mandy Haggith has made her home in Assynt in the north west of Scotland, where she combines writing with sailing, environmental activism, and teaching literature and creative writing at the University of the Highlands and Islands. She won the Robin Jenkins Literary Award for environmental writing in 2009, and in 2013 was poet in residence at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh. She has three other published poetry collections (letting light in, Castings and A-B-Tree), a poetry anthology (Into the Forest), a non-fiction book (Paper Trails) and four novels (The Last Bear, Bear Witness, The Walrus Mutterer, and The Amber Seeker). Her collection Why the Sky is Far Away was published by Red Squirrel Press in 2019.

Red Squirrel Press is a self-funded independent press based in Scotland. It was founded in April 2006 by Sheila Wakefield and has published over 200 titles to date.

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