Alison Brackenbury’s Selected Poems, Gallop, was published in 2019 by Carcanet. New poems can be read on her website:
http://alisonbrackenbury.co.uk/
’75
The summer that I married
I found the pond which would
be dry one fierce year later,
fish flapping, snatched from mud.
I lay face down on grass.
The evening rose in flies,
cloud deepened on still waters.
It swam straight at my eyes,
from hidden bank or hole,
small whisker, endless ripple.
It was the water vole.
Alison Brackenbury
’75 was previously published in Ambit