Poem
Linda France
The Light Migrant
The Light Migrant
The Light Migrant
If a plant grows towards blueness,the light it needs to feed on,
it’s dark that lets it flower – the far red
of dusk, a switch to set day’s edge.
Your skin is clock and calendar,
gauging the length of night you need,
the silence of what may remain
unsaid and slake your deepest root.
Ten thousand miles away,
your body remembers the weight
of the muddy field you left behind,
weathered stones, monochrome;
the brisk omens of sky-changes:
a bowl you know in your bones
if it’s full or empty, scattered
with northern stars, the moon’s salt eye.
Home’s heathery weft unravelled,
you are exposed – infra-red,
ultra-violet – bleached by extrovert
sunlight. A flower transplanted,
earthed in fire, not knowing which senses
disclose where to lean, when to open.
© 2014, Linda France
Linda France
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1958)
Author of seven full collections of poetry and many pamphlets and collaborations, and editor of the influential Sixty Women Poets (Bloodaxe, 1993), Linda France is an expansive force in contemporary British poetry. Her work is finely-tuned and wide-ranging, encompassing a verse biography of the eighteenth-century Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a book of rengas, and poems about gardens, the past, an...
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Poems of Linda France
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The Light Migrant
If a plant grows towards blueness,the light it needs to feed on,
it’s dark that lets it flower – the far red
of dusk, a switch to set day’s edge.
Your skin is clock and calendar,
gauging the length of night you need,
the silence of what may remain
unsaid and slake your deepest root.
Ten thousand miles away,
your body remembers the weight
of the muddy field you left behind,
weathered stones, monochrome;
the brisk omens of sky-changes:
a bowl you know in your bones
if it’s full or empty, scattered
with northern stars, the moon’s salt eye.
Home’s heathery weft unravelled,
you are exposed – infra-red,
ultra-violet – bleached by extrovert
sunlight. A flower transplanted,
earthed in fire, not knowing which senses
disclose where to lean, when to open.
The Light Migrant
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