By Phil Smith

How do you begin the biography of a cloud

Or explain poetry to trees?

Write a tight sonnet under the guidance of a flea,

Raise stings in the skin of theologians, 

Ordain an elk,

Or brew symphonic scores from the cooing of bees? 

Where do you write the dedication of your revision of Genesis to viruses?

Or start work on the provision of new volumes, partly of trees and partly of vellum,

On the matter of intelligent vegetables?

Watching an author flee along a complicated sentence, chased by calves,

Crossing a membrane before spraining an ankle in the drained fields,

You may well wonder if your feelings will be spared,

Or whether you will ever be allowed 

To cower or fail.

How many of us can hang on to arachnids before we fall?

What weaves us all? 

What weaves it all?

Where can we fix our story and end it all,

Print it out in crushed beetles? Spill 

Our ink, stink of shaved pigs? How big

Will our novels have to be to fill all that bubble wrap? 

Will we rhyme in plastic bags?

Or have permission to fill bookstores with seeds and spores? 

When gorse and heather are elected together to the Commons,

How should we respond? Compose the memoirs of a crow, perhaps, 

Or publish the table talk of wood lice and of mites? 

John Bunyan wrote the fable of Pilgrim’s Progress

In Bedford County Gaol. 

How will it feel to be written by a pond near Slough?