Jane Lovell is an award-winning British poet whose work focuses on our relationship with the planet and its wildlife. Her latest collection is the prize-winning God of Lost Ways (Indigo Dreams Press). Jane also writes for Dark Mountain, Photographers Against Wildlife Crime and Elementum Journal. She lives in Kent and is Writer-in-Residence at Rye Harbour Nature Reserve.
Migrations of geese We watch them leave, dragging the sky like chevrons of tide around a pole, an updraft of invisible stars streaming behind them, ancient light infused with visions of their ancestors, now bone, or fragments of bone, trapped in ice: tiny flutes packed with frozen air. of whales Put your ear to the shore, your cheek against this rock; they are below you and above you. Hear them winding and unwinding their strange harmonies of waves and tides, laments woven by the sea dislocating arcs of bone. of caribou Startled, they circle downwind, tails and heads held high. Towards the lakes, paths narrow, force them to follow, mother and calf, its roaming eyes, unsteady hooves. With arrows and spears, we thrust and pierce hide. They buck and stumble, eyes roll skyward, the great heads swing and roar, stub-teeth yellow with lichen. When they fall, the hills shudder.