Paul Green lives on the edge of the Bowland Fells in Lancashire. He probably rolled down. His work has been published in various literary journals, most recently Orbis and Tears in the Fence. He has a background in nature conservation and a foreground in ecological poetry.
The Tern Warden’s beach-hut
You expect them to taper
into respite but they refuse to exit
migration, falling off
the slope of themselves, gathering
angles to scissor the air,
are some trailing geometry forever
traversing an ocean’s coordinates,
are the second before the sea’s
shattering, pipette-beaked bearers
of blood, marram-pricked red.
How one bird hurdled an open door,
came to rest in a line of others within
the borderline of a poster on the wall.
She has woven rope into the shingle’s
joints, ploughed the sand in a clumsy tangent to return
the kettle’s whistle, only for it to soar from a tide-rattled
perch inside her shed. It shrills to a crooked faraway
framed inside a warm mug that clinks of stones
being arranged to circle the blink of tern eggs.
Above the window,
the noon moon is another nucleus
roosting inside a shell,
crowning devotion,
refusing to land.
Paul Green