StAnza Presents

ix: StAnza Presents…

Lungwort

Barbara Davey

Late flurries of snow

settle on the lungwort,

its leaves twice-blotched;

the pink and blue flowers,

soldiers and sailors,

shiver in unseasonal cold.

Hunched at the head of the table

my father sits, breathless and tense. F

or weeks he’s been bed-bound,

the children staying quiet, sent out to the garden.

We mess there for hours, making medicine,

bashing up petals and leaves.

Barbara Davey is a gardener and a poet, living in a village in Fife. She has read at Platform Poetry Nights and most recently at a Poetry and Faith event hosted by St Andrews University. Her work appears in the Transept 2021 Exhibition In/break and she is a committee member of StAnza Poetry Festival.

StAnza brings poetry to audiences and enables encounters with poetry through events and projects in Scotland and beyond, especially their annual spring festival in St Andrews. www.stanzapoetry.org Facebook: stanzapoetry Instagram: @stanzapoetry