Jemma Borg

A creaking at springtime. Compaction. Bright white sleep.

This is how it was for a long time – the head of the world

cold, unfevered, sheer. An almost-violet light.

Now the sea is always speaking – its crystals

wetly sublime and loosen, the fossil water

is freed among veering, grime-capped waves

into the jolt and recoil of motion, and here,

on this coast, the waves find a way

through three houses

and now they take down the middle house

and they breathe its pots and pans,

its red and blue buckets and pieces of wood

in and out of the cavity

as though it were a lost tooth: slosh of debris

through the gap, corrugations of roof in the gum

and the sea is busy at the wound

and the sea is filling the mouth of the land

and the land cannot spit it out –

the unsteady, grey, Arctic sea

that must tell, must tell, of its waking

Jemma Borg won the International Ginkgo Ecopoetry Prize in 2018. She also won the RSPB/Rialto Nature and Place Competition in 2017 and is published in magazines including The Poetry Review and Oxford Poetry. She has a doctorate in evolutionary genetics and lives in East Sussex in England. Her first collection is The Illuminated World (Eyewear, 2014).