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Zoe Brooks
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the poet
Zoe Brooks returned to her native Gloucestershire to write and grow vegetables after 15 years in London. Her collection Owl Unbound appeared in 2020, and her long poem for voices, Fool’s Paradise, won the Electronic Publishing Industry award for Best Poetry eBook – it will be published as a physical book in 2022. Zoe is a member of the management team for the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, and as well as setting up and running the Poetry Events in UK & Ireland Facebook group, enjoys performing poetry.
the poems
My Grandfather and Uncle
My grandfather and uncle
both returned to the earth
with untimely haste.
Although they worked it,
broke its back
for frost to bite into,
dragged sedge from ditches,
clawed back
lambs from snowheaps,
they did not inherit it.
Unless it was
in the length and width
of a man's form.
And it claimed them
early,
reaching up through the chest,
pain filling the arms,
which had gathered harvests.
And still they loved it.
And still they cursed
on cold wet mornings
as it worked
like ringworm into their hands.
In death
they shall inherit the earth.
Until this time
they have been living
on borrowed land.
The Call
You want me to stay a hearthkeeper,
a filler of stoves
and a bearer of logs.
But the forest calls
and all the small unspoken things
living there listen.
You want me to be a guard dog,
a lier by the fire.
You place dead meat in bowls
to comfort me.
But the forest is stirring.
Can't you feel its mossy paws
rising up the walls?
Can't you hear it?
It scuttles in the attic
and leaps on nesting mice,
tears their little limbs
and chomps on innards.
You try to keep out its cold,
but the roof insulation is red
with the death of vermin.
As you pull the rug over your head,
I feel my tail grow bushy,
my snout lengthen,
my teeth turn iron.
In the morning you will find
my bed empty.
Open the door and follow my trail,
if you dare.
Follow it up the hill,
where the track skirts
the ruined farm
with windows black
as the mouth of a gap-toothed hag.
Follow it past the heavy cows
to where the snow will not melt
in the shadow of the birch trees,
to the edge of the forest.
I am waiting for you there.
The Gypsies in the Room
It is the unstitching
of the mind,
we tell ourselves, watching
as she slips further from us,
like an old purse,
the lining opening
to reveal lost coins.
Morphine and dementia
see the gypsies in the room,
silent in a row.
The ancestors come to greet her,
we joke,
to watch over the journey
we cannot take with her,
not yet anyway.
The coins jingle,
crossing the palm
of the ferryman.
Publishing credits
My Grandfather and Uncle / The Gypsies in the Room:
Owl Unbound (Indigo Dreams Publishing)
The Call: Obsessed With Pipework (No. 85)
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