Illuminating the long dark

Recent poems for autumn and winter by Jane Lovell, set in Exmoor’s tree-clad combes and fast-flowing streams.

Hoar Oak Water

We navigate by shadow
and owl call,

time measured only
in the rotting of leaves,
	the creep of frost,
light and darkness
	and shades in between.

Our stories hang
on the breath of wolves,
ash and ember,
mycelium.

There is no end to this forest:

glimpses of tree-clad hillsides
stretch further than possibility.

Sometimes there are birds,
	or ghosts of birds,
winging above the trees,
white and ephemeral.

We hear their calls
illuminating the long dark.

We leave no footprints
where we tread,
	only blackwater pools
	or twig snap,

nothing more.

Fallen tree

Stolen from owls,
hieroglyphics on the stripped trunk,
dark, geometric, unfathomable:

messages we shall never understand.

You run your finger over galleries
carved in the sapwood,
their symmetry of shaft and barb,
plume and hook and claw.
	
Between leaves glooms the black portal
of an eye, you and I caught in its lens,
motionless

and, clattering away behind us,
more angular than the sunlight it evades,
the deer that ravaged the bark,

its memory of darkling beetles
scuttling for cover.

Sometimes

Sometimes the most complicated twists
are the simplest:
the flow of water around rocks,
oxygen and hydrogen at a precise angle of
one hundred and four degrees,
perfectly balanced, bonded.

And, caught in an eddy below,
a single leaf, adrift on the shortening of days
and the cooling air,
pinned in a frenzy by the turbulence
of water buckling
around stone.

Remember the time you stood barefoot
in the Lyn,
the rocks swift with weed,
your heart racing with the spiralling flight
of wagtails and the light falling
brilliant and green?

Sometimes the unravelling of time
is all you need.

Jane Lovell:

Jane Lovell lives by the coast in North Devon and focuses on our relationship with the planet and its wildlife. In 2024, Hazel Press published her collection On Earth, as it is. See her website for more details of her work.

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Poems copyright © Jane Lovell 2025. Photo of oak woods at Horner Water in January © Sara Hudston.