WE ECHO

I am returning.

The city I loved an echo,

choked on its own smoke.

Ash air, wild traffic,

glossy spines of sky-rises that dissolve in the aftermath.

I knew I would be called to the fleshy fields of my body.

I heard their croaks, felt their thirst in the heat.

For weeks, I’ve listened to the sea toss and turn, aching.

I put my ear to the black earth and it hums back.

I pluck seeds from my scalp, craters hardened by the sun.

When my grandmother first told me we were different,

she was brushing back my stubborn curls in the mirror,

bobbles between her teeth for pigtails.

On your 16th birthday you will dream the world is ending.

You’ll watch as everything sparks to flame,

and the sky turns gold with rage.

Your mother and I,

my mother and her mother too have fought through this same dream.

At the last moment, when you’re about to succumb,

you’ll hear the distant hunger of the sea.

Go to it, tend its longing,

you have something it needs.

I started to notice.

Morning rain,

I felt the grateful soil quench,

my arms heavy with new weight.

I heard the trees strategize survival,

the low groan of roots crawling deeper.

I woke in the night to the sting of fresh stems piercing my spine,

I coughed up dragonfly wings,

still beating,

bearing for flight.

While my friends learnt to shave new growths of leg hair with soap and a blade,

my skin puckered under patches of moss and lichen.

I heard their whispers in my absence;

my slimy hair,

its green-tinged trail,

smell of mould,

jasmine, burning.

The city, mothered by the greedy sea,

my stomach felt her gnawing.

Now I put my hand into the salt-froth of the water.

It envelopes skin like an old friend.

Caregiver, I let it drag and fold me.

What’s left in an abandoned city?

We’ll take it back quietly,

a flowering rock,

roots capsizing pavement.

I come from a line of land healers,

our bodies an offering,

a hook between worlds.

I think of my grandmother,

lulled like the tide to return to this place.

I have a photo, or a memory, or a dream;

I’m on her shoulders at the cliff edge,

leaning to the wind and we are,

we are, we are.

Authors Bio

Taylor Edmonds is a poet and writer from South Wales. She was the 21-22 Poet in Residence for the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales and has received a Rising Stars Award from Literature Wales. She has been published or featured by Poetry Wales, BBC Wales, Butcher's Dog, Cheltenham Poetry Festival, Parthian, Wales Arts International and The Senedd.

Debut poetry pamphlet Back Teeth out now with Broken Sleep Books

Writer, poet, performer. (she/her)

@tayloredmonds

Credit to: Wales Arts International