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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