Guest Poems

The Wisdom of Seeds

You don’t seed a cloud with another cloud,
but with bone dry particles of dust.

Sahara dust blown to the Amazon
makes the mineral-poor soils fertile.

The Amazon seeds its own rains which blown
off course make the Sertão desert bloom.

Hopelessly off course on his voyage to the spice rich Indies
America discovered Columbus – a tragic mistake.

The conquistadors who followed stole the gold
but the seeds stowed carelessly in the cargo bay moldered.

A farmer hoards last year’s seed stock –
it is the gold that he’ll invest in future furrows.

Some investments don’t pan out, like a field of beans
planted before a mostly rainless summer.

The farmer, expecting bushels,
reaped a baby-food jar of desiccated beans

which, far from disdaining, he saved and sowed
the next year and the next year and the next

producing a heap of hardship-hardened beans
with which to seed the dry years ahead.

Jungle

It’s January but outside the lawns and grassy verges
are very green after months of rain and the palm trees
in the frontage at the end of our road are thriving.

I love the spread fans of their spiky leaves
and the yellowish cacti spears underneath them –
they jump me to a holiday we had years ago

in Trinidad where our bodies always felt clammy
and even the grass smelt of heat. A mini forest
is flourishing next door and every year the amount

it’s grown surprises me. On the verge
dandelions are in flower and I wonder if the planet
is forgetting winter-cold. The parakeets have disappeared

from our back garden but they’ll be back by spring
and maybe screeching cockatoos will arrive too.
Last night I dreamt I heard tomato frogs

croaking in the brook at the bottom of our park
and I smiled at monkeys swinging on our plum trees,
believing England had reverted to rainforest.