Suzanne Iuppa is a poet, community worker and conservationist living in the Dyfi Valley, mid Wales.
Her poems can be found in literary magazines including The Lampeter Review, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Zoomorphic, Slipstream, The Lake and many others. She has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the WoLF poetry competition, and Highly Commended in the Mother’s Milk Writing Prize. She writes her first full collection with a very loud roosting goshawk for company.
Twitter: @wildernesspoet
The Hawthorn
When it’s not raining
it’s a true August
still, the leaves starting their turn,
wild carrot seeding itself
berries for mouths
the scree of a kite.
The clouds hunker down here
but not today
the Dyfi has a rest
from gorging on spate
heat slows all living things down,
opportunities
for collisions
and recognitions,
allowing the study of small creatures
wanting to be close:
hoverflies suspended,
some taken for beetles,
some taken for bees.
Dry white tufts hang on the creeping thistle.
I slip into grassland, plain-faced
and unimproved,
onto the ridge, parallel with
unpassable bracken;
to straighten eye-level over
clear-felled tops.
I make for you, tree,
out of a stint of
outgrown hazel coppice
sheep desire-line and cow pats
losing their juice in the sunshine.
I hear rough retorts to the wind—
obstinate seasons,
constant rivulets joining at rootdepth.
There are channels in the bark
to sink love notes into;
a returning language.
But today, it’s not raining,
and the tree says, wait.
Laminate years swell and chip,
yet it holds hundreds,
in lichen and pale branches.
Suzanne Iuppa