Photo: telegraph.co.uk

Jake Saunders

Staff Writer

Frey, solid vapor –and the thunder winds,

Slowly pacing in circular motion,

Clouding judgment and sacrificial stares,

Cracked and lighted, and shimmering onward

A fault in the mouth of the sky, gloaming;

One tuft of mountainous puffery lines

Ever-floating and so whitely looming

Fair contrast to its back-dropped counterparts,

While most feathered compounds sway plainly on

Water-bodied horizons, grey and blue,

Sea-like, great and marvelous, thick and chilled –

Holy Sol, eradicate the confines of your lonely outer spaced dimension,

And show yourself, make known your lightness, shine!

Warmth among the deadest rouse of male-bark,

Feet like trunks, rooted and sure, stepping through

Persistent mire, o hands of pestilence

Create your bidding no more against me,

My living flesh and my cold, hollow bones

Of the earth, made whole in a wondrous eye,

My leaflet-fingertips, peeling façade,

My immaculate growing mark birches

When my limbs stretch and hold many ways out,

Strung out, stripped and bare, O god no longer

The aftermath singing like birds of eve’ –

Longing are the owls of the forest-heart,

Crying the whip-poor-will’s of the moon-pane,

Pining are the feathers in the wild dark

Laughing the chuck-will’s-widow in the gloaming

Extant are the deer in the wooded life

And weary are the wolves of harmony,

Rapid stride of cloven and padded strikes;

And lonesome the peaceful bear of great sleep.

Cunning are the feline of the shrouded soul

And bested is the slinking mammal’s weep

As lain upon the cedar’s pedestal;

Sederunt the sap on my canopy –

When agéd spirits of searching true will,

Youth remain in full and ravenous still.

Call upon me and sing over my boughs,

I shall give you warm shelter and honest rest

Under my nourishing limbs and calm peak,

Resolving calamitous reach rung clean,

Giving you rest and granting you slumber!