Seed and Soil

Ultrasound dust distorts this unknown thingwithin me pollen-sugared, silent cries gone static transmit across every fibre of my being –you’re nothing, yet everything

Trodden into my womb pierced through my skin, crumbled into myself I have no choice but to watch you grow I grin and bear the roots, the teething

Squished. Shrivelled. You suck air from every crevice, a ballooning plumule outgrows your coat and scrambles for sun against a crisply taut curtain I keep closed – hidden, but always safe

Air thick with the blanket of dormancy you kick the walls, an amniotic war-cry germinates, stalking spindly arms upwards I’m left with the skeleton of you, skin shed as you slither away becoming radicle, roaming towards a world I cannot reach

And you are established. Your green head buds outwards, suddenly afraid of the coldness, the crispness frail lungs quiver under the weight of petrichor parturitional echoes fold backwards a door forever closed

Every screech of hawk, every thunder of deer, every yellowed moon of an owl’s eye I pray to heavens I cannot hold.

Whereareyounow?

Plucked by beaks, torn by teeth, flourished and floundering under a pollenated gaze?

Quivering under a bee’s brutish squat, or crying resin as the first white petal crumbles away?

Or uprooted altogether, shorn by shears in a green-tinted lab?

Pastel-pink, flower-patterned surgical gloves neuter what they cannot understand rewrite the truths engrained within re-carve with scalpels the stories they want to see, sap splattering their worktops.

Whatever happens whatever fate finalises your being crumble into my embrace so I can finally anchor you home.

Words: Kate Heggie, Design & Illustration: Gracie Whitehouse