Cleeve Hill by Zoe Brooks

 

 


 

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

 

Stories

Poems