Taking my dog to the canal
Its tea coloured peace
Resting behind the town
He noses in nettles
Relieves himself on bluebells
As I eye the bridge's span

Towards its apex
Crushed beneath the roadway
A sapling reaches out
I look closer
Its lignified limb squashed flat
Emerging arthritic
Unfurling green fingers
In a  hopeful
Reaching last

I comprehend the wall
Council funded murals
Darter dragonfly, pipistrelle bat
King fisher
Washed over stone
Pale compensation
For nature entombed

The river has pressed
Sleek backed
Beyond the bank
Forcing walkers back
Giving ducks new horizons
Opposite me here
Wet-footed on the bench
A bare tree is troubled
By some submerged thing
Making a frail and trembling hand
Of its upheld branches

Water moving through this place
Like a dark serpent
Water that fell on hills
Yielded from ice
A hundred miles from here
Passes me now
Passes the willow
Hanging in the last
Orange light of day
Trailing its fingers
In coils and eddies

It is all framed here
Indifferent and alive
Alive and forever passing

It ****** to life in Spring the dry dark Earth
Which points to sun and sends off the Holly King
Like a spark ignites the soot encrusted hearth
The celebrating children dance in rings
The Earth is in us too and deeply carved
In dark and light we are cleaved and tied in knots
And travelling inwards are we standing fast?
Or do we weep at demons we forgot?

What if you take that shadow to the light?
A kernel lifted from the pricked dark Earth
Who’s beading blood in rising runnels might
Rise up in us, to show us all we are worth

The Earth is in us; the light the dark the seasons
To hold our shadow to the light is freedom