Zoe Brooks is a Gloucestershire poet. Indigo Dreams Publishing will be publishing Zoe’s first full collection “Owl Unbound” in 2020. She has had poems published in a wide variety of magazines, most recently in Obsessed With Pipework, The Curlew, Dreamcatcher and The Dawntreader. Her long poem for voices “Fool’s Paradise” received the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition’s award for best poetry ebook 2013.
Cleeve Hill
I found you tiny stars
in the scree of a quarry scrape.
Broken fragments of echinoid stems
sat in my palm
no bigger than breakfast cereal.
Below us an ancient ring ditch
still sheltered the flock,
above us a hawthorn scratched
at clouds with arthritic hands.
The sky roared by
as you said you would make
a necklace of them,
and told me I had fossil eyes.
Years later, after your death,
I found a stone heart
in the shelter of the dip slope
and placed the fossil urchin
above the portal of the tump
where you had lain
on sheep-cropped grass
and said there was no better place.
Zoe Brooks