Literary Vegan

I kept my promise.   Hidden over winter, hope - shelled black and closed, in an envelope. It was still cold when I conjured  the natural, the new and oldest beginnings; I mixed the pink, the orange, two rows of I don't know - your most beautiful was a burnished brown. Some of the seedlings are ten inches high now, though even the smallest  are willing themselves closer to the sky. I compare them to you, give their roots more room to claw. I have no patience, only pictures of pointed suns under the moon last confetti summer. LJ Ireton, 2024

Often, our tears won't come out until we call them by name. Storms wash themselves away, but this kind of rain leaves words uncovered.  LJ Ireton, 2024

I do not have to rise like you because you let the light into the room - does a crysalis released from its cocoon too soon fly beautiful, fly at all? I don't want advice  I am wise to true and sulking clouds - perfectionism feeds the sabbath feeds the portrait. I overthought into my blanket last night, and need to fold myself in poēsis,  I will not explain my stillness,   it is a miracle I will release over the steam of the kettle - into a desperate garden. I will breath damson black-lined wings around a tea cup, invisible things in place.  LJ Ireton, 2024

I never feared time until you found me. Love is like trying to hold the ocean with two arms only. I whisper into the sound of shells, to echo into eternity; outside of precious seconds,  further than the sea . C. LJ Ireton 2024

I read Emily Dickinson on the hill that leads to the heath - where I knew there would be  poetry  in the oldest green, peering out of branches,  hovering somehow - God is on the ground, she said and I found a fox all spiritual red and wild, brushed triangles sniffing in the twilight grey - It enchants me to stillness just to be near Eden's ghosts like this. Gripped by creative novelty, I wanted the crows to hear music,  so I played them 'The Prophecy', to interpret how they wish - I wondered if it was their first time hearing  Taylor Swift in this clearing And the lyrical coincidence  of her being related to Emily - As I sat in the long grass, already  rhyming 'rising strings' with 'glitter-black wings'...  We've lost her! My friend suddenly says - and I am sitting between   the poetry   of animal eyes  and woman-made lines, a fox's nose and a forest prayer  wondering where my own words fit amongst them all.  C. LJ Ireton,...

I drink tea by my seedlings - contagious desire in tiny pots.  I notice everything - the ceanothus blue by my feet, ceramic heat at my finger tips.  Don't you know, silver is one minute with lavender when you love yourself, gold the warming of your thighs under the sun? I remember Hyde park in the heat as a young woman, lunch on the grass - He had left me. I spent my flower time then not even seeing them;  the worth in anything - but growing the question of him; second by lost second into my mind's entire sky.  C. LJ Ireton 2024

To get to know a part of the land you need to feel the water  With your skin , I said And we put our bare feet, our hands; blood lines cut from bramble stinging with the touch, into the bronze-tinted water of the hills - a cold incarnation of its ancient self. We washed off the mud of sunken soil, with the source's own water, coin-like and tumbled down from the white stone heights of the moors. See? I said as we felt the ritual of the wanderer, the sisters - This is the starting point for stories. C. LJ Ireton 2024 (To Stacey)