The Pygmy Giant

By Letty Wilson

The bark is wet and slippery to climb

smooth-wrinkled, seamed with rain, and gaping mouths

of branches broken, healed to rounded lips:

handholds, and a seat in curving boughs,

beech trees shaped like feet and hands, for holding.

Grey-skinned like ghosts, like elephants, like leather

from old boots, blackened by the rain that runs

in seams and cracks down bellies, necks and limbs.

Waxy skin resisting ink, that blots

the base and floods the ground in dead red leaves,

a flood, a depth, a brightness under skies

like spilled milk, scratched at by the shivering twigs

above where leaves fall soft, and rain falls softer

and bird calls sharper, falling all through boughs

like limbs with long-lost hands, that keep on holding

leaves in pools of blotting, blurring red.

The colours always brighter in the rain,

but blurring also, pouring through these fingers.

–

Letty Wilson is an as-of-yet unpublished writer who studies English and creative writing at Aberystwyth university, when she remembers.