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Lost Terrain by John Short


Coleridge spilt hot milk on his foot
and unable to walk in the woods
he wrote a poem imagining it.
I’ve stepped on a plug
while attempting to make a cup 
of morning tea in boxers.
Now I have to hobble around,
furniture-walking in pain.

Like Coleridge, I sit in the garden 
but it’s getting overgrown
and the gardener wants £175
to knock some sense into nature,
full of dedicated spiders spinning webs
and pigeon poop and the roots 
of uninvited trees aiming to undermine
the foundations of this house.

Nature trying to reclaim the terrain
once tamed by lawnmowers
and beautified with sheers.
I guess I’ll go indoors and live
as poets mainly do: by proxy.
Visualise a stroll in the country.
Let nature return the garden
to the way it thinks it ought to be.

---

John Short lives in Liverpool again after a previous life in southern Europe. When not writing he still persists in trying to play Greek music. He’s appeared recently in Pennine Platform, Flights e-Journal, Foxglove Journal and the Bosphorus Review. His fourth poetry collection In Search of a Subject is due from Cerasus Press in 2023.

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