Literary Vegan

Red Kite in the after-rain: a mountain-sharp survivor  of the apocalypse city – wild exists, wild lives  in your triangle stillness. Moth-tail, rust-tilt, lit-up by clouds, your feather-tips grip the wind itself; like you harness more than air – the whole sky is subject  to your clawed curtsey. I am – iron and balcony give way to dandelion belly, bird-bone beast. You do not warn. You pre-exist. Seagulls have just scattered at one glimpse of you,  gliding in from where God waits  with a gauntlet glove. C. LJ Ireton 2025

Just past the mountains, indigo at dusk,  the ducks form a shepherds' staff of finger-tip chevrons flying over  the string of filament lightbulbs bordering the lake. Innate order, bone high they complete a prophecy of mine that birds will always come over still water if you wait  but I wasn't waiting -- the sun upside down in my wine glass, a spear of hot star on blue stone, we spoke of salt nights and serenity while the ducks moved in the sky, knowing I needed them to prove my own words startling me with what I know -- forever poetry pointing weightless and breathing. C. LJ Ireton 2025

I knew I wouldn't stop loving you, wherever you were.  200 miles only on the outside. But I had no idea I would feel beautiful, for the first time, when you weren't around. That when I invited myself to the dance, I found it was waiting for me, wildflower in the mirror. LJ Ireton, 2025

Thirsty, growing seeds sigh into the petrichor cracked, damp shells let go LJ Ireton 

The tea-coloured soil is stiff, dry that giving-up line on the faded myth of spring I wake it with fork and fingers, twist the deeper dark out, blinking in the sudden, burnt light. Turning the un-oiled tin of winter upside down - I'm pouring butter potential  now, blood colours stir  the size of insect buttons. I pull cosmos dusk, ox-eyed daisy seed futures down from the borders  of my cobwebbed mind. My wanting to try was iced by the moon nights, you are the words I release with the trowel  for the ladybird to land on, the moth, any frozen spirit, needing to hear flowers after the silent cold. C. LJ Ireton 2025

These words run immortal. Red-ribboned bookmarks meet them, rivers journeying through earth and to the sky in hot words, released in breath. Bound temporarily between paper covers; they rain italic  along blue-gold evening fields —  whispered over the flowers given by those who know, or try to say, what love is. Never dead; fireflies in bookshop dust, everything I said of us is echoed, overlooking the aging lake — with pages closed, letters still dip and reflect the sun.  Inspired by Our Infinite Fates by Laura Steven   C. LJ Ireton 2025