You come to listen to the swamp’s thaw,
water rushing up in hushed whispers
from the frozen ground over
the jagged stones wedged in your throat. You
have held this shotgun-in-the-mouth silence for too long.
Each beneath-the-leaves rustle, each witch-fingered web
of tree roots unearths a silent gasp.
You imagine your stand-off with the lone buck means something,
each budding antler rolling in a carpet of fresh moss,
a blanket of only beginning.
This is the place where toppled trees
with rotten centres become homes
to your unborn. This is where
each wide-winged shadow of the hawk’s hunt
paints a latticework of movement
in a world inhabited only by ghosts.
Each curve in the path bends like the belly of a spoon,
cradling breath, the gentle echo of a woodpecker.
Loose bark dusts in your fingers, blows out like ashes
in each pull of the vice unstrapping in your chest.
Each branched scaffold offers a toehold.
Later you will remember each humped turtle shell
clambered upon the driftwood lodged in the pond.
You will remember the sun’s diamond streamers
waked and rippling along the surface,
the heat of the red dirt beneath your hands.
A teacher of writing for 25 years, Gillian Freebody never tires of the riches life has to offer. As Simone Weil once said, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” After a long hiatus from writing spent teaching and raising two children as a single mother, Ms. Freebody is thrilled to discover her love of writing poetry once again. It is through writing that she has rediscovered herself and the great “generosity” of poetry after many years of “sourcing out.”