Pollard Sprouts - Shani Cadwallender

One of the Top 24 submissions in our 2022 Urban Tree Festival writing competition.

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Pollard Sprouts 

These cutbacks

Notwithstanding, 

Here’s hoping:

     I’ve just twigged 

At your participles

A gentling,

           extending, it’s a graving in sky 

 it’s 

               Not over yet;

Yeswithstanding 

Wintry dearth

And summer’s rot, 

no shame to

come back weaker

           If you come back

                      All the same.

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Shani Cadwallender

Shani Cadwallender is a poet, teacher and part-time PhD hopeful at Birkbeck UoL. Her creative-critical doctoral project, ‘Trees Revisited’, concerns C19th arboreal poetry.