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Likestarlings is a place for talking in poems. We pair poets with poets and they write a sequence of six new works by responding in turn to one another. Our palaver blog goes beyond poetry to discuss collaboration in theory and in practice. Please take a look, and feel free to add comments, opinions and suggestions here. Read poems here
 

Pond Cleaning


Here there is everything to do.
Spring, coming late, writes hurried lists
its ‘to do’s’ italicised in slanting shoots
leaning out towards returning light.

The heron has come back, a shrugged shadow
over the netted pond. The fish are replete with winter sleep.
Heavy-still with darkness, they tremble briefly.
We draw back the net, push the urgent yellows of king cups
back through, straighten buckled iris swords. Prepare to clean.

Then we see the frogs. The periscope eyes, a slow surfacing
into enemy lines, then the first low volley of lust’s beat.
They swell into a timpani. One note suffices.
In abstracted silence they stare golden-eyed, ‘in flagrante’,
but already beyond the cold heat
that dragged their moist bodies across roads, across gravel
to this embrace.

I feel their cold upon my lips: an absence of princes
the indifference of frogs.