On looker - Chris Cuninghame
Long-listed written pieces of 250 words or under submitted to the 2021 Urban Tree Festival writing competition on the theme of “trees close to you”
On looker
The bark could scratch initials on to skin so that it would be,
A year on, and then some more, lain upon the layers beneath
Like a Rosetta stone that was made entirely from its memory.
A year on that could not record a story that had hardly begun
Rested up against its great trunk. – Old treasure chest of news
Slips time between fingers and sky, changes from moon to sun
With a voice whose kind is in the strength of the listening ear
For a chattering squirrel to know and moths to find their place,
With its making of the leaf to turn as the marker of every year.
The question – or what shape it has in human form – replies,
To map and daypack and a lolling can drained of drink besides:
Is seeing better with glasses on or off against darkened skies?
These words you see are the shadows of trees, like a flat pack
Of wolves anticipating their assembly, while other animal scent
Stays its move. A yawn, bickering, a play, but whose eyes crack
With the light between close branches. It doesn’t matter when
The hunt for the record of a once upon a time wished upon itself -
It’s all here, here and here - in this uncoiling of the spring again.
Imagine that, alongside the chewed grief of a mouthful of earth,
Stood time’s keepsake that could carve its ladder out of a breath,
Imagine in the flowering canopy is the myriad moment of rebirth.
Christopher Cuninghame lives in east London and has worked internationally. He plays music sometimes, closing the windows if he remembers.
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