.png)
Barnaby Harsent
back
next
the poet
Placing third in The Rosemary McLeish Poetry Prize 2024, and with poems in 14 magazine and Propel Magazine, Barnaby Harsent has work forthcoming in the 2025 Black Bough Poetry Christmas/Winter anthology. His three poems for iamb form part of a sequence of short narratives he's currently working on.
the poems
Wormwood –
speaking to spirits
The air is thin, the sky just beginning to bruise.
She gathers wormwood to burn under the sycamore tree.
The smoke curls low and slow like breath in winter,
she closes her eyes to amplify any whisper.
Light fades, crows settle like thoughts in bare boughs,
a leaf in the ash still green – as if it has secrets left to share.
Mandrake – hallucination
Lie still. Let the room grow distant. Let the walls forget you.
Let the straw, heavy with the stench of piss, disappear from under you.
Men’s faith in what you’re not, has made you what you are. Fall upwards.
Do not cry out. Do not return. Refuse to bring yourself back to bone.
Move with weather, find a wind to hold you.
And leave your root, that knotted thing, bleeding its shape into air.
Valerian – rest
She doesn’t ask for comfort, just the calm of quiet seclusion,
a slowing of the pulse.
Still they turn their heads and spit, weigh her worth out loud.
She lays plants out on a rack, the sun pulling moisture from the root.
Still her nights are restless, sleep as thin as frost on slate.
There’s a gate where the treeline thins. It opens and she walks until
the path forgets her name.
Still the milk sours, still the crops fail, still the children of the village
cry at shadows.
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb