
Today I went in to Glasgow to lead a session at a poetry writing group at Kibble Palace, in the Botanical Gardens. I very much enjoyed it. A lovely group of people, all of whom write beautifully, so much so that I felt like a fraud being asked to ‘lead’ them. I hope that I might yet connect with them again.
I set a couple of writing tasks, one of which involved taking some time to walk out in to the park and write sometihng from the perspective of an object or plant that they encountered. People wrote as fish, as park benches and, of course, as trees.

I too chose a tree. It was a rather odd one; a highly scented tree that seemed to have two different kind of blossoms on it at once. A laburnum perhaps and something else. At first I was fascinated, wondering what miraculous wizardry or natural phenomena had formed this exotic oddity. Here it is, at distance so as not to interupt the girl sitting beneath it;

It reminded me of one of those creatures popular at Victorian freak shows; half rabit and half cat, or the woman whose legs were that of a deer or a goat.
The tree seemed to me to be a beautiful abomination.
I wrote this small sketch;
YOU decided
WE had no say in the matter
You spliced us like timber
Now our lovely limbs sway and splay
As if by clockwork
Let scent from our blossoms
Choke you
No…
No.
Let it rest on you like
A long lost memory
Of when you too
Walked the wild fields
When we were free